New Theory Links Law, Sovereignty, Public Memory

By Heather Phillips 22/08/2026 6 min read 5 views

The memory begins with a stone platform built on barren land for executions. As a child, the author watched it through fog, afraid but unable to look away.

Later, as an adult, he stood on it himself, trying to understand what it meant to occupy a place whose meaning was produced by the possibility of another person’s death. That experience grounds a broader argument: the death penalty must be abolished in Iran, not merely as a humanitarian preference, but because it reveals something fundamental about how the state uses law to transform killing into an administrative act.

The platform still stands.

Law can become secret, raising new challenges.

Georg Simmel, writing in the early twentieth century, argued that secrecy is not simply the absence of information but a basic form of social relation. No interaction between people rests on complete knowledge of the other. We cannot enter another consciousness or exhaust another person’s thoughts, intentions, or memories. Social life, Simmel held, depends on a decisive non‑knowledge of one another. Total transparency would collapse the distinction between persons, turning autonomous subjects into entirely observable objects.

Simmel distinguished secrecy from lying. The liar falsifies; the person who keeps a secret does not necessarily distort anything. Secrecy can simply mark that some reality is unavailable to a particular observer.

Law cannot be treated as a private participant in social interaction. It speaks through bodies that imprison, fine, regulate, and sometimes kill. Its decisions enter the biographies of individuals and the historical memory of communities. For this reason, the legal order carries an obligation to remain visible to those upon whom its coercive effects fall.

Personal secrecy protects the individual from excessive social penetration. The distinction changes how we understand legal memory. Law is not just a set of rules for present cases. It is an accumulation of decisions, punishments, exceptions, and practices through which a society learns what its law has actually meant.

An ideological legal order does not necessarily require false laws. It can operate through the control of visibility. What cannot be publicly reconstructed cannot be collectively interpreted. What cannot be interpreted cannot be criticized. And what cannot be criticized begins to appear as necessity. Simmel described modern societies as “credit societies” because individuals depend on countless others they will never know. The same applies to law. The more complex society becomes, the more citizens rely on bodies whose internal operations they cannot personally observe. They cannot inspect every prison or read every prosecution file. They must depend on institutional credibility. But this creates a paradox: the need for trust increases precisely as the possibility of opacity grows.

Between two individuals, incomplete knowledge can preserve autonomy. Between an institution and the population it governs, systematic non‑knowledge can produce domination. The same formal condition — one side knowing less — carries opposite meanings depending on the distribution of power. Under non‑democratic conditions, the bodies that determine what is visible may themselves be controlled by the state. The power to classify something as hidden belongs to the same authority whose conduct requires scrutiny. The state knows the citizen; the citizen does not know the state.

This is why the question “what should remain secret?” is insufficient. One must also ask who is capable of keeping the secret, from whom, and with what consequences. A secret held by a vulnerable person can preserve life. A secret held by a powerful institution can preserve impunity. During the protests in Iran in 2026, doctors and nurses treated people privately and outside hospitals after they had been shot by security forces, because identification inside hospitals could expose them to military or police authorities. Here, secrecy functions as a shield, not as domination. The patient’s identity may need to remain secret. The fact that the patient was shot need not. The doctor occupies two positions simultaneously: secrecy toward power and disclosure toward society.

An arrest that leaves no public trace is an event deprived of social continuity. A death that is never publicly reconstructed remains an isolated incident. A disappearance without records becomes uncertainty, and uncertainty becomes a political instrument. The authoritarian state does not need to falsify every fact. It can achieve something more sophisticated: fragment facts so they never form a social pattern. Disclosure changes the ontological status of an event. A private injury becomes a public fact. A public fact becomes an object of interpretation. Interpretation produces comparison. Comparison makes patterns visible. Patterns make institutions accountable. The movement is from isolated experience to collective intelligibility. Information answers what happened. Memory permits society to ask what the event means in relation to other events.

The execution platform from the author’s childhood was not merely a physical object. It was a condensed legal history. Authoritarianism often depends upon preventing interpretation rather than preventing vision. People may see the prison, the police, the courtroom, the execution platform. What they are discouraged from doing is connecting what they see to a broader structure of law and power. Transparency often imagines an observer looking through an institutional window and discovering the facts inside. It asks whether society can reconstruct the relationship between institutional action and lived experience. A transparent document can remain politically meaningless if no one can interpret it. A fragmented archive can remain opaque even when technically available.

Under authoritarian conditions, the ordinary channels of interpretation are weakened. The citizen may need to become witness, archivist, translator, lawyer, journalist, historian, and sociologist at once. The state has an interest in preventing its actions from becoming intelligible as a system. Its central question is not “Should this be secret?” but “What political relation is produced if this remains secret?” If secrecy protects a vulnerable person from coercion, it may be justified. If secrecy prevents society from understanding the exercise of coercive power, non‑secrecy becomes necessary. International journalism, human‑rights documentation, and diaspora testimony can preserve events that domestic bodies attempt to erase. The state may control the domestic archive, but it cannot necessarily control every memory that crosses the border.

The private person becomes increasingly observable while the coercive institution becomes increasingly opaque. The citizen’s body, location, and communication may become legible to power, while the procedures through which power acts become illegible to the citizen. Not by abolishing confidentiality, but by preventing confidentiality from becoming impunity. The author still remembers the stone platform. To a child, it appeared as a frightening object in the fog. To an adult, it can be read as a material inscription of sovereignty. The fear did not belong to the stone. It belonged to what the stone represented: the possibility that an institution could transform death into procedure, violence into legality, and memory into something that could eventually be forgotten. The abolition of the death penalty would not erase the platform’s history. It would change the relation between the object and the society that remembers it. The stone could remain. The memory could remain. What would no longer remain is the legal power that gave the stone its terror.