To live outside the law you have to be honest

Between history and legend, populated by bandits and cowboys, sheriffs and outsiders, the epic of the West still raises fascinating questions about how blurred the line can be between law and violence, between "good guys" and "bad guys", between justice and freedom. The western tale, in fact, unfolds following the caravan tracks and the steam trains that cross the great American spaces.

On the uncertain line of the frontier, where the civilized world discovers its limits, the outlaw moves, a true founding myth of the United States, protagonist of the western imaginary. A myth still capable of being current as demonstrated by the volume " The Outlaw Life " (Salerno Editrice, 2022, pp. 180) written by Tommaso Gazzolo , associate professor of Philosophy of Law at the University of Sassari . Through an analysis that alternates the chronicle of the time with the narration of popular literature - and, later, of cinema -, the book then tries to reflect on the ambiguous relationship between rules and life, between civilization and wilderness .

And try to answer a question with very modern implications: what does it mean to live outside the law? This is the first question we ask Tommaso Gazzolo:

«To understand this, we need to refer to the logic of the 'ban', i.e. to an act through which the law places someone 'outside' of its sphere of application - which means: outside so much of the duty to respect its commands , however, as much as from the protection and respect for the rights that it grants even to those who transgress it. The important point is not to confuse life 'outside' the law with a life 'without' or 'before' the law: in fact, in our case the law continues to exist – it is, after all, that 'banned' the life. The outlaw still feels her breathing down his neck, and he knows his life is what it is because the law made it that way. And this is what is paradoxical: that the law remains present, in some way, but in its absence; it remains as the presence of an absence, as abandonment».

But really, as we read in the book, isn't an outlaw necessarily a criminal?

Strictly speaking, I'd say it never is. Indeed, if the outlaw by definition is someone to whom the law does not apply, he can never, properly speaking, transgress or violate it. This does not mean, of course, that outlaws often do not also commit criminal acts: robberies, kidnappings, murders. Then certainly the law seeks them out, tries them, punishes them – but, precisely, as criminals, not as outlaws».

As Bob Dylan wrote "to live outside the law, you have to be honest"?

"I think yes. Dylan is saying something like: if you live within society, within its laws, you don't need to be honest, you can also be a criminal, a delinquent – society basically protects its offenders, even when it punishes them, respect their rights, and so on. But if you stay 'outside' the law, if no protection is granted to you, things are more complicated. You don't have someone to tell you what's right and what's wrong to do, you don't have someone who, even if you haven't been so honest, lets you go in the end. Everything here depends on you.'

In what sense does the figure of the outlaw undermine our way of understanding justice, even today, and at the same time is it its foundation?

"It's not easy to explain. Whenever there is a law, it also always says: there is no other justice than that which punishes those who violate the law and defends those who have seen the rights that the law grants them violated. That is, he says: there is no justice 'outside' the law. This, however, implies a paradox: on the one hand, justice needs to bring within itself any conflict that claims to be resolved outside of it; on the other hand, however, since there can be no 'inside' without an outside, no interior without an exterior, the very fact of making some conflicts resolvable implies producing others which by definition cannot be 'justifiable'. However, the French philosopher Jean-François Lyotard said it much better than me, when he distinguished the concept of 'quarrel' from that of 'dissension'».

But do we always need the law to live?

“This is properly a diabolical question, for a simple fact: that we cannot think of what a life 'without' law would be like, if we do not look at it, imagining it from the point of view of the law. We often hear things like: without law, men would kill themselves for nothing, would give free rein to their most violent passions, etc. This is the mistake we always make: we pretend to demonstrate how men would live without law, by actually describing how they behave in the life they lead under the law, in societies governed by the law. If there's one thing we can know, then it's that certainly the man who lives under the law, who is man as we know him, tends to suck – he's often petty, distrustful of his neighbor, he's violent, stupid, and so on. We don't know what man would be like if he freed himself from the law, but there would perhaps be more to hope for, if only because, in order to be able to live without the law, he would have to have abandoned many of his bad habits. Moreover, we almost never remember that, strictly speaking, the law, if correctly understood, should have as its ideal that of making itself superfluous: its true realization would be its end».