Certain Thoughts on Post-truth in Law

The article presents an attempt of the author to address the issue of post-truth in the legal reality. It tries to cover the issues of post-truth genesis as a term, its interrelation within philosophical, religious, journalistic discourse, and its essence and role in law. The author concludes that post-truth cannot be viewed as a newly established term and that it has continuously been used before. It has been used by different ancient nations’ educated citizens, and continued on with being used by religious leaders and European philosophers afterwards. The idea of post-truth can be traced in most classic philosophic works, and it keeps getting attention by legal, philological, and philosophical researchers, as well as the researchers in other fields. Post-truth is currently one of the most addressed topics around the world due to its tight links with the current highly debatable political occurrences (annexation of Ukrainian Crimea, subsequent military operations in Eastern Ukraine, Brexit, recent United States’ presidential elections, as well as many other aspects being clear only to a certain point. The main goal of post-truth as a term is to divert the attention of its object from applying rational decision making to applying emotional decision making even if one is not fully substituted by the other. It urges the object to be guided by emotions more than by common sense and rational choice while it does not fully dwell on emotions thus leaving room for certain rational choice decisions made under strict control of the newly created reality it is a basis of. This reality is also not a unique accomplishment. Virtual reality has been a subject of research for the whole of human history. It was well addressed by religious leaders (and still is), by scientists, psychologists, novelists, medical researchers, journalists, philosophers, as well as lawyers. The article specifically focuses on the role of post-truth in law, and makes a conclusion that this term is not new for law and legal practice, while there is a long evidence of post-truth ideas having been used in almost all court hearings, and by almost all participants. The article also points out the fact that due to its long history of co-existence with post-truth, law has developed a comprehensive set of borderlines partly aimed at dealing with post-truth negative outcome. It includes legal norms, procedural norms, legal knowledge, and common sense. The article also stresses the fact that posttruth methods may not always be used in a negative context. It is not uncommon of post-truth methods to have outcome positive for society or for certain individuals.