Here we hold some references, clips and notes on the perpective of Ugo Mattei - on corporations, the state, the hegemony of US corporate law and law for the commons.
Ugo Mattei - a specialist in law of social justice and commons - emphasises - how labour in the modern state produces ‘the public’ and ‘the private’ as a couple, via the producing, enforcing and globalising of law per se; and - how the production of ‘commons’ - in radical opposition to dispossession by the diabolical twins of State- and-Capital - calls for a new phenomenology of justice and state.
# Ugo Mattei clips
Ugo Mattei & Marco de Morpurgo (2009), ‘Global law and plunder - The dark side of the rule of law’. Downloaded 15apr2018 <https://works.bepress.com/bocconi_legal_papers/15/>
>mh notes: Rule of law #1: securing property rights, enforcing contracts, enforcing contracting. Rule of law #2: an algorithm, a machine of supposed justice and fairness. Imposition of law by military force. Imposition of law by threatened starvation of trade. Diffusion of rule of law by modernisation and participation in administrative complexity (a ‘science’ of public administration). ‘Governance’ a disguise for sending a gunboat, universality of legal process a Trojan horse for machine administration. Global hegemony of corporatist US corporate law patterns.
Ugo Mattei (2011), ’The State, the market, and some preliminary questions about the commons’, March 18, 2011, Council of Europe DG III: Social Cohesion, Human Rights of People Experiencing Poverty. Downloaded 14apr2018 <https://works.bepress.com/ugo_mattei/40/>
>The state v. private debate presents a false dichotomy, a distinction without a difference . . . . Private property and the State are the two major legal and political institutions that carry on the dominant view of the world. The common wisdom, presents them as radically conflicting . . . more state is equal to less market and less market is equal to more state . . . . the two entities, as social and living institutions, can only be structurally linked in a relationship of mutual symbiosis. The fabricated clear-cut opposition between the two is a precise ideological choice of the individualistic tradition . . . . Both archetypes are inserted into a fundamental structure: the rule of a subject (an individual, a company, the government) over an object (a private good, an organization, a territory).
Ugo Mattei (2015), ‘First thoughts for a phenomenology of the commons’, in Bollier & Helfrich (2015), *The wealth of the commons*. Downloaded 05mar2019 <http://wealthofthecommons.org/essay/first-thoughts- phenomenology-commons>
>The commons are not concessions. They are resources that belong to the people as a matter of life necessity. Everybody has a right of an equal share of the commons and must be empowered by law to claim equal and direct access to it. Everybody has equal responsibility to the commons and shares a direct responsibility to transfer its wealth to future generations. The commons radically oppose both the State and private property as shaped by market forces, and are powerful sources of emancipation and social justice. However, they have been buried by the dominant academic discourse grounded in scientific positivism. They need to be emancipated by an authentic shift in phenomenological perception in order to produce emancipation. >Social justice is pursued in Western democracies by the (currently declining) institutions of the Welfare State. Access to social justice programs is usually understood as provided by “rights of second generation,” which require a specific obligation of the State to respect and guarantee them. >This vision, which places the specific burden of satisfying social rights on the government, has been central to the evolution of Western jurisprudence. Since the Scientific Revolution and the Reformation, social justice has been expelled from the core domain of private law. The Scholastic notion of law in the 16th century – which was based on two concepts of justice, distributive justice and commutative justice – was abandoned at the outset of modern Western jurisprudence. Starting with Grotius in the 17th century, concerns over justice were equated to issues of fairness in contractual exchanges between individuals.