June 29, 2010

Performer of the Narcocorrido Murdered

Mexican singer Sergio Vega, known as El Shaka, was assassinated last Saturday. Mr. Vega was known for his performances of the songs known as "narcocorridos" or drug ballads. Notes the Urban Dictionary, "Literally translated it [narcocorrido] means "drug ballad", though not all narcocorridos are about drugs. Corridos have long described the poor and destitute, bandits and other criminals, as well as illegal immigrants to the United States, but the focus is on drug smugglers. Narcocorridos often refer to particular people, events, and specific dates that tell a story."

For more about narcocorridos, see among other titles Elijah Wald's book Narcocorrido: A Journey Into the World of Drugs, Guns, and Guerrillas, Sam Quinones' True Tales From Another Mexico (University of New Mexico Press, 2001), Mark Cameron Edberg, El Narcotraficante: Narcocorridos and the Construction of a Cultural Persona on the US-Mexican Border (University of Texas Press, 2004), Tracy Arwari, The Narcocorrido: A Musical Subculture In Translation (Georgetown University Press, 2003), Rubén Tinajero Medina and María del Rosario Hernández Iznaga, El narcocorrido: tradición o mercado? (Universidad Autonóma de Chihuahua, 2004) and John McDowell, Poetry and Violence: The Ballad Tradition of Mexico's Costa Chica (University of Illinois, 2000).

Rear Window

Michael Ruse stands up for the Hitchcock classic Rear Window here.

June 23, 2010

Tolstoy and Spanish Law

José Calvo González has published El alma y la ley. Tolstói entre juristas. España (1890-1928)(Sevilla: Comunicación Social Ediciones y Publicaciones (2010)(Colección Historia y Presente, nº 5). More information from the website, where you can also read an excerpt from the first chapter, "Tolstoi y la cultura literaria del Derecho en Espana (1890-1928)" (Tolstoy and legal literary culture in Spain (1890-1928).

The author is Professor of the theory and philosophy of law at the University of Malaga and Judge at the Tribunal Superior de Justicia of Andalucia.

A Clockwork Orange

Daniel Albahary has published A Legal Analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ and What it Means to Modern America. Here is the abstract.


Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film adaptation of Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, “A Clockwork Orange,” is a shocking and fascinating film. Upon its initial release, it was rated “X” in the United States before it being re-edited to obtain an “R” rating. Beyond its cinematic worth the intense violence and misogyny it embodies and suggests, however, the film reveals much about the then and now contemporary attitudes towards criminal punishment prevailing in western democracies. Law professor Robert Batey claims that the film provides a vehicle “for students to examine fundamental aspects of criminal law.” Taken to the next level, the film also reminds us of the many international and domestic legal questions provoked with respect to human subject experimentation and the creation of the Nuremberg Code following the Nazi atrocities of the Second World War, the Belmont Report in the United States following the notorious Tuskegee experiments, as well as the infamous MKUltra program sanctioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The film remains, in some sense, timeless for these reasons. But it is even more significant because the Kafkaesque and dystopian prophecy of the future it portends may be extant in modern day America. The film is consumed by themes of maintaining law and order, reducing criminality, and identifying appropriate forms of punishment for criminal violence and deviant behavior. On a deeper level, the film questions the roles of society and government in creating the social and legal realities in which we live.

“A Clockwork Orange” thus may not only be Kubrick’s quixotic fantasy of violence and brutal misogyny but more the ideological suggestion of a pseudo-fascistic incarcerative police state that may one day arise in America and other Western democracies in response to violent criminal or deviant behavior, or perhaps even with the aim of “brain-washing.” Although mostly the work of English authors such as Anthony Burgess, George Orwell, and Alan Moore, the idea of a reemerging fascist state that dubiously imprisons and variously tortures its citizens is not unimaginable in the eyes of Americans such as Naomi Wolf.

Echoing this possibility, “A Clockwork Orange” is a surreal, often uncomfortable portrayal of a once respectable society in social and legal decay. The film presents a frightening picture of a society where violence has begun to tighten its stranglehold on the populace. While a sturdy police and authoritarian state presence exists to combat the persistent violence, society is on the brink of total chaos as hooligans ruthlessly threaten law and order. The central themes and events of the film illustrate the film’s continued relevance to contemporary issues including the desire to combat youth violence, the desire for social, moral, and legal order, the desire for justice, the desire to prevent cruel and unusual punishment, as the well as the desire to meet the goals of retribution and rehabilitation in criminal punishment.

Produced almost 40 years ago, “A Clockwork Orange,” as an expression of political culture, still resonates in contemporary American society. The themes and events present in the film presciently serve as indicia of the social, political and legal reality the nation may find itself in if the government does not cease to circumvent the rule of law in some cases, does not continue to zealously protect the natural and constitutional rights of citizens, and alter its current practice of incarcerating increasing numbers of prisoners in others.

The paper performs a legal analysis of the film and explore the relevancy it has for modern day America. While some issues may remain unresolved, it adopts a normative view of the law and, mirroring the central events of the film, analyzes the retributivist nature of juvenile punishment, the importance of preventing cruel and unusual punishment, and the legal status of the forced administration of psychotropic drugs to prisoners.


The author has not provided the full text, or an indication of where it is available. Interested persons might try emailing him.

Hollywood and the Rhetoric of Race

Cynthia D. Bond, The John Marshall Law School, has published Laws of Race/Laws of Representation: The Construction of Race and Law in Contemporary American Film, at 11 Texas Review of Entertainment & Sports Law 219 (2010). Here is the abstract.

Within hours of the soul-stirring and nation-lifting election of Barack Obama as president, journalists and pundits were announcing the demise of all prior notions of race in America. Even during the campaign itself, narratives of a "post-racial" America were bandied about. But the historic nature of Obama’s ascendance does not obliterate or transcend the vast history of race and racial representation in America. The representational techniques of the construction of both law and race in popular film are deeply interdependent. Both law and film are story-telling, narrative systems. Race is also a narrative system in which visual representation is key. The significance of the visual apprehension of race is deeply relevant to the legal construction of race as well. (For example, in early citizenship cases and racial “passing” cases which persisted through the latter part of the 20th century.) Since society constructs racial categories in large part by visual identification and experience, all visual media, including film, necessarily participate in the constitution of race. Thus, films do not simply depict supposedly free-standing, objective, racial categories naturalized by the dominant discourse, but instead actually participate in the creation of race. As part of standard Hollywood practice, the mainstream film audience is constructed through identification with a norm of “whiteness.” Since that audience, when viewing a law film, is actively involved in constituting the law as part of its spectatorship, it follows that mainstream films construct law from the perspective of white privilege. The consequences and effects of this cinematic construction of law are many. This article discusses three main effects: 1) the raced construction of the lawyer-hero; 2) the denial or displacement of the law’s role in constructing race and race-based discrimination; and 3) the suppression or revision of politics and political history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

June 22, 2010

Sonnets and Statutes

Jeffrey G. Sherman, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent School of Law, has published Scorn Not the Sonnet: In Search of Shakespeare's Law. Here is the abstract.
Legal scholars love to use Shakespeare’s works as stimuli and even models for legal analysis. We write about King Lear or Measure for Measure or The Merchant of Venice but rarely about the Sonnets. Why is that? Perhaps we find the poems too obscure. Or too insipid. (One of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets – the “Fortune and men’s eyes” one – seems at first glance to say nothing more than “When I’m feeling depressed, I think about you, and that cheers me up.”) In this article, I examine three of Shakespeare’s sonnets and illustrate how a legal scholar or law professor might use these poems as scholarly or pedagogical vehicles. These illustrations will not discuss legal issues to a point of conclusion but will simply present some legal issues as analytic opportunities offered by a close reading of the Sonnets.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

June 21, 2010

An Early Taste of "The Defenders"

CBS has posted video clips of its upcoming new legal drama "The Defenders", which stars John Belushi and Jerry O'Connell, here. The show, which is set in Las Vegas, seems to have no relationship to the iconic E.G. Marshall/Robert Reed series of the early 1960s. Mr. O'Connell, you'll remember, finished up one year of law school at Southwestern this spring. Here's a description of the show from the CBS website.
THE DEFENDERS, from the executive producer of CSI: CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION, is an irreverent new legal drama about two fiery and charismatic Las Vegas defense attorneys. Tenacious, defiant and completely engaging, they argue the law, and they follow the law, but they always keep a few tricks up their sleeves. No matter what the odds, these lawyers keep fighting for the little guy.


I listened to some of the stars' comments, including the assertions that one currently sees legal shows from the point of the view of the prosecutor. I'm not so certain of that. I think we've seen a fair number of defense lawyer shows, just in the past few seasons. Think about Boston Legal, The Practice, Just Legal, Eli Stone, The Deep End, Raising the Bar (agreed, this show features prosecutors and defense attorneys), Drop Dead Diva, The Good Wife...shall I go on? If you're curious about the number and point of view of lawyer shows, check out this roster, courtesy of Marylyn Robinson of the Tarlton (University of Texas) Law Library.

June 16, 2010

Bloomsday

Happy Bloomsday. On December 6, 1933, Judge John Woolsey ruled that James Joyce's Ulysses could be imported into the United States, since it was not, as the United States government maintained, obscene. The Second Circuit affirmed. United States v. One Book Entitled Ulysses by James Joyce, 72 F.2d 705, 706 (2d Cir. 1934).

And just in time, Apple has done a 180 on its attitude toward Robert Berry's Ulysses app. Yesterday his images were too, well, nude for the Job(s).

More on Bloomsday from the L.A. Times, Bloomsdayrun.org, the James Joyce Centre, and the New York Times.

Bibliography:

Corn-Revere, Robert, New Age Comstockery, 4 CommLaw Conspectus 173 (1996).

Ernst, Morris L., Reflections on the Ulysses Trial and Censorship, 3 James Joyce Quarterly 3-11 (Fall 1965).

Gillers, Stephen, A Tendency to Deprave and Corrupt: The Transformation of American Obscenity Law from Hicklin to Ulysses, 85 Washington University Law Review 215–96 (2007)
Pagnattaro, Marisa Anne, Carving a Literary Exception: The Standard and Ulysses, (Summer 2001).


Segall, Jeffrey, Joyce in America: Cultural Politics and the Trials of Ulysses (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993).

Vanderham, Paul, James Joyce and Censorship: the Trials of Ulysses New York: New York University Press (1998).

Younger Irving, "Ulysses in Court: The Litigation Surrounding the First Publication of James Joyce's Novel in the United States", in Classics of the Courtroom (James W. McElhaney ed.; PEG, 1989).

June 14, 2010

DC Bar Foundation Acknowledges Laurence Fishburne For "Thurgood"

From BLT, the blog of Legal Times, a post noting that actor Laurence Fishburne got a thank you from the District of Columbia Bar Foundation for his performances of "Thurgood," a play devoted to the late Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall. Here's more about Mr. Fishburne's performance, and about the play, written by George Stevens, Jr.

June 13, 2010

Law and Literary Studies Colloquium, Hong Kong University

Announcement of a Law and Literary Studies Colloquium, June 23-25, at Hong Kong University. Here's a link to the website.

June 11, 2010

Lawyers In Your Living Room

Michael Asimow, University of California, Los Angeles, School of Law, has published Lawyers in Your Living Room! Law on Television an introduction, in Lawyers in Your Living Room (Michael Asimow, ed.; ABA Press, 2009). Here is the abstract.


From Perry Mason and The Defenders in the 1960’s to L. A. Law in the 80’s, The Practice and Ally McBeal in the 90’s, to Boston Legal, Shark, and Law & Order today, the television industry has generated an endless stream of dramatic series involving law and lawyers. As a result, most members of the public receive most of their information (and misinformation) about what lawyers and judges do and how legal institutions function from absorbing pop culture representations on television. This book features 36 chapters about legal television, both domestic and foreign, written by 40 different authors. In addition, it contains celebrity introductions by Sam Waterston and James Woods, two of the premiere actors portraying lawyers in contemporary television.
The book covers the Judge Judy phenomenon (including her foreign counterparts) as well as shows that are not primarily about lawyers but feature important lawyer characters (such as The Simpsons or The West Wing). It also contains chapters about the production of dramatic legal shows, including writing and technical advising, and about legal ethics on television. The book concentrates on the personal and professional character of the lawyers -- which runs the gamut from fearless champions of the innocent to the sort of unethical or personally dysfunctional lawyers that the public loves to hate.

June 9, 2010

The McCarthy Hearings

The New York Times reminds us that on this day in 1954, attorney Joseph Welch faced down Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy. On behalf on his young colleague Fred Fisher, whom McCarthy had assailed indirectly as a Communist because he was a member of the National Lawyers Guild, Welch stormed,"[U]ntil this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness." According to the Times, he went on, "If there is a God in heaven, it [the attack on Mr. Fisher] will do neither you nor your cause any good." Members of the audience applauded Welch.

Welch later went on to be cast as the judge in Otto Preminger's film Anatomy of a Murder, opposite Jimmy Stewart as Paul Biegler, Ben Gazzara as Frederick Manion, and Lee Remick as Laura Manion. He also was a guest host on the Kraft Television Theatre and had some other hosting roles on television.

June 8, 2010

Law, Language, and the Humanities

Penelope J. Pether, Villanova University School of Law, has published "Language, in the Law and the Humanities: An Introduction", in Law and the Humanities (Sarat, Anderson & Frank eds.; Cambridge University Press, 2010).

This chapter from Sarat, Anderson and Frank's Law and the Humanities, An Introduction (Cambridge U.P., 2010), opens with a "post 9/11" clinical teaching "war story," concluding "so much for acronym, euphemism, context, signifiers, and what they signify, writing, positive law and its bureaucratic and institutional simulacra, institutional and disciplinary discourses, surprise, its absence, familiarity, shock, and outrage; and cultural stories, tropes, schemas, or plausible narratives, like the performance of both truthfulness and trauma, or what we might call their discursive construction; and the sites where law and language are evident kin. What of law and language? What does telling stories about law, including the genre of “war stories,” suggest about this aspect of the interdisciplinary field constituted by law and humanities work? After all, “‘[c]ollecting stories,’” Ewick and Silbey write, in one of a group of recent thoughtful critical studies of law and language that complicate the distinction between linguistic humanities and linguistic human science method, “and ‘having conversations’ is not the usual way of describing social science research.” More to the point, all of these aspects of the writing about law might equally be found in other sociocultural institutions and their discourses."

Beyond registering that the body of work on law and language that proceeds from the premise that language is but a medium of transmission for the substance of law has been left methodologically behind by contemporary law and language scholarship, this much might also be said: This survey of the state of contemporary humanistic Law and Language scholarship suggests four main conclusions.

The first is that much of value in this body of work involves applying linguistic humanities andor critical linguistic human sciences methodology to the work of legal institutions, discourses, and texts, and could equally be replicated in “and language” interdisciplinary work in other professions, practices of subject formation, disciplines.

Next, some of it - and the scholarship of Peter Goodrich stands out in particular here - is about the unique or distinctive relationships between law and language. That said, this chapter’s third conclusion about law and language scholarship and the praxes that might be informed by it is that much is yet to be done in the subdiscipline of scholarship concerning itself with the unique or distinctive insights that might emerge from interdisciplinary inquiries into “law” grounded in the work of influential theorists of language and discourse. A cursory sampling of such scholars working in the post- and neostructuralist language studies traditions might range from Derrida and Foucault and Irigaray to Halliday, Kress, and Threadgold to Badiou and Lacan and Kristeva. There are likewise possibilities for interdisciplinary work in law and language that might be potentiated by the development of Peircean semiotics and the linguistic philosophy of Searle and, to a lesser extent, Austin.

This in turn suggests survey’s fourth conclusion: That to the extent that there is an aspect of law and language scholarship that is presently significantly underdeveloped, it is the interrelationships among theories of language, of subject formation, and of law. Lines of inquiry exploring this question might be generated by work drawing on sources that include Husserl’s phenomenological theorization of meaning and language and its account of the communicating subject, and Bourdieu’s work on both discourse and subject formation.

The balance of this chapter is divided into six main sections that in turn map distinctive subtypes of Law and Language scholarship: “Humanism and its Supplements;” “InstrumentalPhenomenal;” “PhilosophyTheory;” “Pedagogy and Subject Formation;” “Practice;” and “Culture.” I have endeavored to select both representative and significant scholars to exemplify general arguments, with inevitable omissions.

Law and Semiotics

Anne Wagner, Université du Littoral Côte d'Opale, and Jan M. Broekman, Pennsylvania State University School of Law, have published Prospect of Legal Semiotics (Springer, forthcoming). Here is the abstract.


This book examines the progress to date in the many facets – conceptual, epistemological and methodological - of the field of legal semiotics. It reflects the fulfillment of the promise of legal semiotics when used to explore the law, its processes and interpretation. This study in Legal Semiotics brings together the theory, structure and practice of legal semiotics in an accessible style. The book introduces the concepts of legal semiotics and offers an insight in contemporary and future directions which the semiotics of law is going to take. A theoretical and practical oriented synthesis of the historical, contemporary and most recent ideas pertaining to legal semiotics, the book will be of interest to scholars and researchers in law and social sciences, as well as those who are interested in the interdisciplinary dynamics of law and semiotics.

“The dependence of law upon the media of its transmission has long constituted a controversial open border with other disciplines. Prospects of Legal Semiotics takes a radical and expansive view of possible frameworks for addressing the signs of law in an increasingly virtual and predominantly visual epoch of global dissemination. Wagner and Broekman are especially to be commended for the imaginative and rigorous manner in which they have opened legal semiotics to a novel methodological interrogation at the same time as they have encouraged analyses that go beyond the established jurisdiction of law.”

June 3, 2010

The Use of Images and Law

Jessica M. Silbey, Suffolk University Law School, has published Evidence Verité and the Law of Film, at 31 Cardozo Law Review 1257 (2010). Here is the abstract.
This paper explores a puzzle concerning the authority of certain images that increasingly find themselves at the center of legal disputes: surveillance or “real time” film images that purport to capture an event about which there is a dispute. Increasingly, this kind of “evidence verité” is used in United States courts of law as the best evidence of what happened. Film footage of arrests, criminal confessions, photographs of crime scenes (during and after) is routinely admitted into court as evidence. It tends to overwhelm all other evidence (e.g., testimonial or documentary) and be immune to critical analysis. Why would this be so?

This paper situates this phenomenon in the current legal United States context, with a brief history of “evidence verité” and its treatment at law. It then compares side-by-side two cultural institutions, photography and law, as examples of institutions with power and influence over public and popular consciousness. How do these two institutions intersect? What patterns of influence and persuasion emerge from the partnership of photographic or filmic images and the role of law? The paper explores these questions by tracing the life of certain iconic public images in hopes that doing so will tell us something about how they came to be iconic: how their circulation and reception in the United States rendered the images meaningful beyond their textual existence. Studying the circulation and recirculation of these photograph images helps make sense of how “real time” images in culture and at law might shape our understanding of important, historic events beyond the facts these images depict.

This paper is not a paper about how we understand images as a psychological or neurological matter. It is a paper about how law and legal processes frame images and how images – especially “real time” images – frame or shape the law. The photographs the paper examines include the “Migrant Mother” from the Great Depression, the bombing of Hiroshima, the flag raising at Iwo Jima during WWII, the Times Square Kiss on VJ day, the US landing on the moon, the first in utero photographs of a human fetus, and images of torture at Abu Ghraib prison.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Legal Science, Legal Theory, Legal Naming

Hanoch Dagan, Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, and Roy Kreitner, Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, Harvard University, and Tel Aviv University, Buchmann Faculty of Law, have published The Character of Legal Theory, in the Cornell Law Review. Here is the abstract.

For nearly a century legal scholars have vacillated between two strategies for dealing with the collapse of legal science as an autonomous discipline. One typical response has been to abandon the notion of a legal theory and to borrow a theoretical discipline from the social sciences or from the humanities. Another response has been to discard the idea of legal theory by highlighting the practical wisdom of lawyers and celebrating law as a craft.

Our mission in this Essay is to describe legal theory as an enterprise robust enough to justify separate naming. Legal theory focuses on the work of society's coercive normative institutions. It studies the traditions of these institutions and the craft typifying their members, while at the same time continuously challenging their outputs by demonstrating their contingency and testing their desirability. In performing the latter tasks, legal theory necessarily absorbs lessons from law’s neighboring disciplines. But at its best, legal theory is more than a sophisticated synthesis of relevant insights from these friendly neighbors, because of its pointed attention to the persistent jurisprudential questions regarding the nature of law, notably the relationship between law's normativity and its coerciveness and the implications of its institutional and structural characteristics.

Before we turn to elaborate on these features, we begin with an outline of the three other important discourses about law: law and policy; socio-historical analysis of law; and law as craft. Sketching these three genres of legal scholarship is instrumental for our task because analyzing the ways in which legal theory is different from these other modes helps us characterize legal theory.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Portia's Conception of Justice

Roberta Linciano, University of Salento, has published 'Is that the Law?': Portia's Mockery of Justice in The Merchant of Venice as an Italian Society for Law and Literature (ISLL) Paper Essay. Here is the abstract.
In this paper I examine the role performed by the disguised lawyer Portia during the trial Shylock vs. Antonio in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. With reference to the social, political and economic background of the Elizabethan age, I will explore Portia’s conception of justice, trying to assess if she acts as a loyal and equitable judge or as a vile impostor and investigating to what extent her conduct can be regarded as a model by modern lawyers or as a mere play upon the words.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. (NB: The essay is in Italian).

June 2, 2010

Law and Language Scholarship

Penelope J. Pether, Villanova University School of Law, has published Language, in the Law and the Humanities: An Introduction, in Law and the Humanities (Sarat, Anderson and Frank ed.; Cambridge University Press, 2010). Here is the abstract.
This chapter from Sarat, Anderson and Frank's Law and the Humanities, An Introduction (Cambridge U.P., 2010), opens with a "post 9/11" clinical teaching "war story," concluding "so much for acronym, euphemism, context, signifiers, and what they signify, writing, positive law and its bureaucratic and institutional simulacra, institutional and disciplinary discourses, surprise, its absence, familiarity, shock, and outrage; and cultural stories, tropes, schemas, or plausible narratives, like the performance of both truthfulness and trauma, or what we might call their discursive construction; and the sites where law and language are evident kin. What of law and language? What does telling stories about law, including the genre of “war stories,” suggest about this aspect of the interdisciplinary field constituted by law and humanities work? After all, “‘[c]ollecting stories,’” Ewick and Silbey write, in one of a group of recent thoughtful critical studies of law and language that complicate the distinction between linguistic humanities and linguistic human science method, “and ‘having conversations’ is not the usual way of describing social science research.” More to the point, all of these aspects of the writing about law might equally be found in other sociocultural institutions and their discourses."

Beyond registering that the body of work on law and language that proceeds from the premise that language is but a medium of transmission for the substance of law has been left methodologically behind by contemporary law and language scholarship, this much might also be said: This survey of the state of contemporary humanistic Law and Language scholarship suggests four main conclusions.

The first is that much of value in this body of work involves applying linguistic humanities andor critical linguistic human sciences methodology to the work of legal institutions, discourses, and texts, and could equally be replicated in “and language” interdisciplinary work in other professions, practices of subject formation, disciplines.

Next, some of it - and the scholarship of Peter Goodrich stands out in particular here - is about the unique or distinctive relationships between law and language. That said, this chapter’s third conclusion about law and language scholarship and the praxes that might be informed by it is that much is yet to be done in the subdiscipline of scholarship concerning itself with the unique or distinctive insights that might emerge from interdisciplinary inquiries into “law” grounded in the work of influential theorists of language and discourse. A cursory sampling of such scholars working in the post- and neostructuralist language studies traditions might range from Derrida and Foucault and Irigaray to Halliday, Kress, and Threadgold to Badiou and Lacan and Kristeva. There are likewise possibilities for interdisciplinary work in law and language that might be potentiated by the development of Peircean semiotics and the linguistic philosophy of Searle and, to a lesser extent, Austin.

This in turn suggests survey’s fourth conclusion: That to the extent that there is an aspect of law and language scholarship that is presently significantly underdeveloped, it is the interrelationships among theories of language, of subject formation, and of law. Lines of inquiry exploring this question might be generated by work drawing on sources that include Husserl’s phenomenological theorization of meaning and language and its account of the communicating subject, and Bourdieu’s work on both discourse and subject formation.

The balance of this chapter is divided into six main sections that in turn map distinctive subtypes of Law and Language scholarship: “Humanism and its Supplements;” “InstrumentalPhenomenal;” “PhilosophyTheory;” “Pedagogy and Subject Formation;” “Practice;” and “Culture.” I have endeavored to select both representative and significant scholars to exemplify general arguments, with inevitable omissions.

Download the chapter from SSRN at the link.