John Finnis on the central case of the legal viewpoint and radically corrupted Potemkin legal systems

The sixth annual Scarpa Conference at Villanova (2011) was devoted to the work of John Finnis. Most of the papers delivered at the conference were published in Volume 57, Issue 5 of the Villanova Law Review. Those interested in learning more about the methodological starting point for a sound understanding of jurisprudence will profit from attending to the exchange between Michelle Dempsey and John Finnis regarding Chapter 1 of Natural Law & Natural Rights. 

Re-reading these essays recently, I took note of Finnis's description of "the central case of the legal viewpoint" and his discussion of "radically corrupted Potemkin [legal] systems." Quotations below.

On the central case of the legal viewpoint:

If there is a point of view in which legal obligation is treated as at least presumptively a moral obligation (and thus as of “great importance”, to be maintained “against the drive of strong passions” and “at the cost of sacrificing considerable personal interest”), a viewpoint in which the establishment and maintenance of legal as distinct from discretionary or statically customary order is regarded as a moral ideal if not a compelling demand of justice, then such a viewpoint will constitute the central case of the legal viewpoint. For only in such a viewpoint is it a matter of overriding importance that law as distinct from other forms of social order should come into being, and thus become an object of the theorist’s description.

Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights, at 14 (citing H.L.A. HART, THE CONCEPT OF LAW 169, 173–74 (2d ed. 1994)).

On "radically corrupted Potemkin [legal] systems":

It can be the case, and I think in that even in these corrupt times, it is by and large the case (in our political communities), that there are vastly many laws which had better not be reformed and which had better be complied with, applied, and enforced without skepticism but rather with commitment—since if they are not so applied, it will be the vulnerable who unjustly suffer. Virtually everything you consider yours to possess and count on in the future is little more than a tissue of contractual and other legal entitlements—unless you are relying on bars of gold, shotguns and a gang of ruthless associates. And if you are subject to legal proceedings, what you should hope for is fidelity to laws of evidence and procedure and not ad hoc law reforms made on the run by skeptical judges and jailers. But that is here and now. There is not the slightest presumption, according to my theory ... that we do in fact live in a central case of a legal system rather than in radically corrupted Potemkin systems such as Hitler’s or Stalin’s.

Those were men interested only in an “indirect”, that is, incomplete, evaluation of law—as an instrumentality salient for the opportunities it afforded for the bending of its content, genesis, and administration to the demands of the interests of their party and gang and their supporters, as a technique of deception and confusion parasitic on the prestige of earlier or historic legal orders somewhat closer to the central case. And while we are thinking of those dark times, we can recall that only a few years earlier Max Weber had identified the central case of governance as precisely the legal-rational, and had admitted that governance and law of that type cannot reasonably be regarded as legitimate, and therefore fully functional on its own terms, except by the body of ethical-rational thought that, in line with the tradition, he called natural law [Naturrecht].

Finnis, Response, 57 Vill. L. Rev. 925, 931 (2012).