Gobsmack. The lawful arrest pre-dates philosophy, yes; it's the product of Sophists. but law and lawyers are very much the bastard children of philosophy.
Not sure what defence you have of this statement, but I'd like to hear it. If you read Plato, for instance, who gives (by all accounts) credible examples of the types of arguments sophists made, it's fairly clear that back then they were all too familiar with the reality that law was backed by power, which was another way of saying those who controlled the laws could kill you if you disobeyed them. If they were tyrants, for instance, "law" simply meant you had to do what they said or die. In that sense you could call law "naturally a priori" since killing people who challenge you is perfectly natural, but the construct of "lawful arrest" is surely then just derivative of "we'll do what we like with you and if you try to stop us you die." On this basis, which I suspect you are not championing as the model of civility we like to think we enjoy now, "lawful arrest" is identical with submission to power of those stronger than you; hardly the hallmark of a mutually agreed upon 'society of laws.' If, however, you mean something different, like for instance laws as dictated by representatives of the people and enforced by the courts and the police, then that is not at all derived by the type of "law" as demonstrated by such interlocutors as Callicles in Plato's "Gorgias" (not to be confused again the the famous speech by Gorgias himself on Helen of Troy).
Even in the case of democratic ancient Athens there is a case to be made that the process of government was hardly the egalitarian society of laws where a 'lawful' arrest was in a theoretical sense the result of the populace itself agreeing that arrests under those circumstances
should occur. We can see this clearly enough in the arrest and forced suicide of Socrates, who was clearly the target of a few de facto tyrants masquerading as representatives of the public (gee, that's so different from now, isn't it?).
In short I agree with godsblackestcrow in that there is no way around the fact that defending oneself against violence is self-defence no matter what the circumstances are. What we are left with is having to say that self-defence is only afforded as a right under certain circumstances, which sounds funny but there you are. Linguistically this makes it muddy to speak of a person defending himself from someone else when, in fact, he had 'no right' to do so (for instance when he's committing a crime and the police attempt to detain him). But functionally this brings up the issue of what circumstances
ought to justify using force against a person; or more specifically, at precisely which moment the person's right to defend himself vanishes. If, after all, committing a crime removes that right, there must be a certain standard of verification that he committed such a crime. An officer may not detain someone for a zero percent chance he committed a crime, and or even on the basis of a remote chance of it without a warrant to do so. The officer should therefore require pretty damn good evidence that a person has committed or is committing a crime to engage in violence to detain the person. And yet while sometimes this is what happens, at other times people are assaulted by police sometimes for being in the wrong place at the wrong time, for trying to record them lawfully, for being in a house that gets no-knock raided mistakenly, or for getting emotional and agitated around an officer (which is not a smart thing to do, but also should not warrant violent preemptive action).
