Lawful versus Legal

"Panarchism has a component that has to do with what is lawful versus what territorial entities make legal. The two, lawful and legal, are not the same. We could use a great deal of research in this area. As John recounts, there are islands of lawful behavior that are not consistent with the surrounding sea of what is legal, but the sea sometimes allows the island to persist and does not flood it over. Why is that?

Are there patches of lawfulness within the sea of legality that can be found and made to grow? There MUST be failures of logic and consistency and failures of lawfulness within the sea of legality, for us to have what we have today. Can we discover these and elucidate them? So that the lawful can grow and push away the unlawful that claims to be lawful by being legal?"

The above two paragraphs are taken from a longer private e-mail message received from Prof. Michael S. Rozeff. I am so very glad to be allowed to quote them to you, after a much too long interruption, as a significant contribution for the restart of this blog.

Mike now adds the following considerations to his above lines:

"It's a research agenda of mine, to find the lawful that has been buried within the mass of the legal that parades around as lawful, so as to use it against the legal and appeal to all the many common people who instinctively recognize the lawful but who get trapped into thinking the legal by certain strains of unlawful thinking that they do not so easily recognize as unlawful, because they override them in their thinking with some other thing that they think is necessary or good. The old adage is 'necessitas legem non habet' (necessity knows no law.) People think what is necessary overrules what is lawful, and they make the necessity or felt-necessity or thought-necessary into the legal. So, another way to go about this separation or movement back to what is lawful and away from the legal is to show people that the things they think are necessary and that they are constantly told are necessary -- are not necessary at all, and they don't have to be imposed by legal force."