Exemptions without justice? The robust exemptions puzzle and its political solution

Contemporary liberal states abound with legal exemptions, most of which serve to accommodate the interests of cultural minorities from the indirect effects of general laws. Exemptions, however, are far from philosophically straightforward. Whatever their legal form might be, there are a variety of conceptual and normative puzzles. Indeed, scholarly debates have seemingly reached a genuine impasse on these problems, including the very coherence of exemptions and their role in attaining the requirements of justice. This paper seeks to offer a novel alternative approach based on considerations of political legitimacy or the normative limits of state power. Despite the striking implausibility of this insofar as exemptions seem to necessarily presuppose the legitimacy of the law, the proposal is defended as possible via a nuanced extension of liberal legitimacy to the relatively under-theorised domain of application and enforcement in specific contexts or instances of individual objection. I sketch this in terms of three Axes of what I call modal legitimacy – i.e., the manner or mode of the law’s application and enforcement.