Jurisprudence – Undergraduate Laws Blog

This post has been contributed by Professor Jill Marshall, Module Convenor for Jurisprudence.

Welcome to the first Jurisprudence blog of 2023-24. I hope you are enjoying the course and learning to read theoretical works with a critical eye. By this I mean asking yourself if you agree or disagree with what is written and writing down your instinctive responses to what you’ve read.

This week Oxfam, a leading charity on global poverty, published its inequality report, Inequality Inc., while business elites gather for the World Economic Forum in the beautiful Swiss resort town of Davos. The report examines how sharply billionaire wealth has grown since 2020, only three years ago, when the global pandemic was restricting individual freedoms. The report argues that rising corporate and monopoly power lead to inequalities of gender and race, as well as economic inequality, and that these issues are all interconnected.

It is noted that the wealth of the world’s five richest men has more than doubled from $405 billion (£321 billion) to $869 billion (£688 billion) since 2020. Meanwhile, the wealth of the poorest 60% – almost 5 billion people – has fallen. Inequalities between different nation states of the world, as compared to others and large multinational corporations, is noted. You are asked to consider this information in the context of your course, in particular Marx, Marxism and Marxist Legal Theory, Liberalism and law, especially equality and justice theories, and feminist legal theory.

In what ways can you link the report to these topics in Jurisprudence? You are encouraged to think for yourselves. For example, is it morally right and can or should law do something to change the fact that it would take 1,200 years for a woman working in the health and social sector to earn what the average CEO in the biggest 100 Fortune companies earns in a year (see the report below for this reference)?

Can you reflect on what John Rawls, feminist legal theorists, and Karl Marx make of this and of the argument reported by an investor and founding member of Patriotic Millionaires UK, a nonpartisan group of British millionaires campaigning for a wealth tax. Julia Davies said “Only 4 pence in every tax pound comes from taxes on wealth. It is miniscule, especially when compared to income at 42 pence in the pound. I am fortunate enough to be able to contribute more and want to do so. People argue that millionaires like me can just donate more voluntarily to the Treasury – but this clearly isn’t a solution. Just like income taxes, wealth taxes should be mandatory, not optional.” (as reported in the reference below)

Some pointers from the course for consideration: you will see in the chapter on Marx, Marxism and Marxist Legal Theory information and commentary regarding the subsection on Marxism, law and international economy. It states that it would be possible to argue that the law should not be concerned with issues of international social justice but has a narrower role as a formal tool to regulate world markets. Might it be possible to suggest that if those markets operate to the benefit of certain parts of the world, and to the marginalisation of others, then the Marxist insight into the nature of capital is still relevant? The basic Marxist jurisprudential insight being that to understand law, you must look to the economic forms that underlie the law; to understand globalised law, aim to understand aspects of the global market.

In the chapter on Liberalism and law, Rawls’s principles of a theory of justice require the equal freedom of each individual person. Yet the difference principle allows for inequalities in wealth so long as the least well off are better off than in a state of pure equality. Does this work when we see the statistics in Oxfam’s report?

In the chapter on feminist legal theory, you will see arguments regarding equality of opportunity and structural dominance of male oppression. What would feminist thinkers make of the gender disparity in the Oxfam figures?

References:

https://www.oxfam.org.uk/media/press-releases/wealth-of-five-richest-men-doubles-since-2020-as-wealth-of-five-billion-people-falls/