Jason Krentos (University of Hertfordshire) has posted The Rule of Law as a Community of Strangers: A Horizontal Dimension on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper introduces ‘strangerdom’, the epistemic separation between legal agents, as a normative feature of the legality 1. Because the legal writer cannot be expected to know or converse with an open-ended class of future addressees, interpretation must function as an act of reading rather than authorial retrieval. I formalize this via the ‘Reason Test’, a set of participation terms requiring reasons to be non-arbitrary, social, and protective of the agent’s ‘right’ to initiate fact patterns. Applying this to the Jewish Free School (JFS) case 2 , I demonstrate how strangerdom secures intelligibility where positivist and interpretivist frameworks fall short.