Date of Award
2025
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
Political Science, PhD
Program
School of Social Science, Politics, and Evaluation
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
Melissa Rogers
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Javier Rodriguez
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
James Nichols
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Kenneth Leonardo
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2025 Tristen Fleig
Subject Categories
Political Science
Abstract
Plato, Aristotle, and Montesquieu each argued the importance of law to political regime and Constitution. The ancients emphasized the law as the rational component of the regime and Montesquieu applied some of the first political science to show how political regimes rely upon law. Still, the exact connection between law and politics, and law and philosophy more broadly has remained largely obscured. In my account, legal system ought to be understood as the institutional framework that supports and protect a particular kind of life accepted by the intellectuals and the people of a nation. Using DIM theory from The DIM Hypothesis by Leonard Peikoff, I examine American history to argue the connection between law and the philosophical mode of the dominant culture in American society. Separating out American history out into three different legal regimes, early, middle, and late, I discuss the progression of America’s legal systems. Each part of this dissertation discusses a period in terms of the philosophical context that led to the creation of the legal regime, the key cases that gave further definition to the regime, and a key justice for the period as well as the key attributes of the courtroom etiquette and structure. Together, the discussions of these aspects of a period’s legal system is meant to establish its identity properly categorized as based on one of the five DIM modes of in The DIM Hypothesis . The early American legal system is classified as of the integrative mode; the middle American legal system is classified as of the mixture of the integrative and disintegrative modes; and the late American legal system, yet to be, is classified by the disintegrative mode. The transformation of the American legal system has been from a philosophically integrative legal system, towards a disintegrative legal system. In the context of law, in Part Two, I argue that the early American legal system was the first objective legal system; in Part Three, I describe how the disintegrative pressures around the time of the Civil War led to the transformation of this objective legal system into a fundamentally administrative legal system; in Part Four I describe how the modal logic accepted by the pluralists in changing from an objective legal system led to the continued transformation of our legal system until today, toward egalitarianism. I argue this progression from integration to disintegration has yet to be completed, as the egalitarian legal system has not been fully formalized. The dominant philosophy of legal scholars today may be disintegrative, but until the American legal system sheds it integrative elements, the transformation of American law is not yet complete. This dissertation has two main conclusions. First, that law is a uniquely important subculture for DIM theory, as the law is the final step in crystalizing the dominance of a particular philosophy in the culture. Second, that American legal history should be understood as having three distinct legal periods and that it has progressively changed from a legal system based on the integrative mode to a legal system based on the disintegrative mode. The future of American law will depend on convincing the American people to accept a certain way of life.
ISBN
9798315736714
Recommended Citation
Fleig, Tristen. (2025). DIM Theory Applied to Law: The Disintegration of American Law. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 946. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/946.
