A New Book From Marianne Constable

Marianne Constable, University of California, Berkeley, has published Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford University Press, 2014). Here's a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Words can be misspoken, misheard, misunderstood, or misappropriated; they can be inappropriate, inaccurate, dangerous, or wrong. When speech goes wrong, law often steps in as itself a speech act or series of speech acts. Our Word Is Our Bond offers a nuanced approach to language and its interaction and relations with modern law. Marianne Constable argues that, as language, modern law makes claims and hears claims of justice and injustice, which can admittedly go wrong. Constable proposes an alternative to understanding law as a system of rules, or as fundamentally a policy-making and problem-solving tool. Constable introduces and develops insights from Austin, Cavell, Reinach, Nietzsche, Derrida and Heidegger to show how claims of law are performative and passionate utterances or social acts that appeal implicitly to justice.
Our Word Is Our Bond explains that neither law nor justice are what lawyers and judges say, nor what officials and scholars claim they are. However inadequate our law and language may be to the world, Constable argues that we know our world and name our ways of living and being in it through law and language. Justice today, however impossible to define and difficult to determine, depends on relations we have with one another through language and on the ways in which legal speech—the claims and responses that we make to one another in the name of the law—acts.

New Book From Desmond Manderson

Desmond Manderson has published Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law--The Legacy of Modernism with Routledge. Here is the description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Kangaroo Courts and the Rule of Law -The Legacy of Modernism addresses the legacy of contemporary critiques of language for the concept of the rule of law. Between those who care about the rule of law and those who are interested in contemporary legal theory, there has been a dialogue of the deaf, which cannot continue. Starting from the position that contemporary critiques of linguistic meaning and legal certainty are too important to be dismissed, Desmond Manderson takes up the political and intellectual challenge they pose. Can the rule of law be re-configured in light of the critical turn of the past several years in legal theory, rather than being steadfastly opposed to it? Pursuing a reflection upon the relationship between law and the humanities, the book stages an encounter between the influential theoretical work of Jacques Derrida and MIkhail Bakhtin, and D.H. Lawrence's strange and misunderstood novel Kangaroo (1923). At a critical juncture in our intellectual history - the modernist movement at the end of the first world war - and struggling with the same problems we are puzzling over today, Lawrence articulated complex ideas about the nature of justice and the nature of literature. Using Lawrence to clarify Derrida’s writings on law, as well as using Derrida and Bakhtin to clarify Lawrence’s experience of literature, Manderson makes a robust case for 'law and literature.' With this framework in mind he outlines a 'post-positivist' conception of the rule of law - in which justice is imperfectly possible, rather than perfectly impossible. 

The Origins of Law

Jacques DeVille, University of the Western Cape, has published On Law’s Origin: Derrida Reading Freud, Kafka and Lévi-Strauss in volume 7 of the Utrecht Law Review (April 2011). Here is the abstract.

This article's main focus is 'Before the Law', a text by Derrida on Kafka's Before the Law, in which Derrida also comments on Freud's Totem and Taboo. Freud, in this text, enquires into the origins of religion, morality, social institutions and law. He contends that this origin is to be found in a crime, the killing of the primal father by a band of brothers, followed by the institution of totemism and the incest prohibition. Freud's psychoanalytical account of the origins of the totem and the prohibition of incest has been challenged from various quarters. The article enquires whether Freud's Totem and Taboo and its theory of the primal horde in relation to the origins of law should be dismissed in light of these challenges, or whether some insight can still be gained from it. The second option is affirmed, with Derrida's 'Before the Law' pointing to the importance of reading Freud in a way analogous to Kafka's Before the Law, and more specifically to the need for a reconsideration of the originary nature of the Oedipus complex, so as to arrive eventually at a kind of 'pre-origin' of law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Some New Books From Routledge

Some new titles of interest from Routledge (abstracts from the publisher's catalog)

Jacques de Ville, Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitality (due August 2011).

Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitality presents a comprehensive account and understanding of Derrida’s approach to law and justice. Through a detailed reading of Derrida’s texts, Jacques de Ville contends that it is only by way of Derrida's deconstruction of the metaphysics of presence, and specifically in relation to the texts of Husserl, Levinas, Freud and Heidegger - that the reasoning behind his elusive works on law and justice can be grasped. Through detailed readings of texts such as To speculate – on Freud, Adieu, Declarations of Independence, Before the Law, Cogito and the history of madness, Given Time, Force of Law and Specters of Marx, De Ville contends that there is a continuity in Derrida’s thinking, and rejects the idea of an ‘ethical turn’. Derrida is shown to be neither a postmodernist nor a political liberal, but a radical revolutionary. De Ville also controversially contends that justice in Derrida’s thinking must be radically distinguished from Levinas’s reflections on ‘the other’. It is the notion of absolute hospitality - which Derrida derives from Levinas, but radically transforms - that provides the basis of this argument. Justice must on De Ville’s reading be understood in terms of a demand of absolute hospitality which is imposed on both the individual and the collective subject. A much needed account of Derrida's influential approach to law, Jacques Derrida: Law as Absolute Hospitality will be an invaluable resource for those with an interest in legal theory, and for those with an interest in the ethics and politics of deconstruction.

Law and Art: Ethics, Aesthetics, Justice (Ed. Oren Ben-Dor). (published March 2011).

The contributions to Law and Art address the interaction between law, justice, the ethical and the aesthetic. The exercise of the legal role and the scholarly understanding of legal texts were classically defined as ars iuris – an art of law – which drew on the panoply of humanist disciplines, from philology to fine art. That tradition has fallen by the wayside, particularly in the wake of modernism. But, as this book demonstrates, a
consideration of the relationship between law and art can still bring jurisprudence, and particularly critical
jurisprudence, to life. In its attention to the inexpressible, art can contribute to the liberation of legal doctrine from its own self-imposed limits. It can inform the ethics of a legal theory that is concerned to address how theoretical abstractions and concrete oppressions overlook the singularity and spontaneity to which art attests. The contributors to this volume – and their engagement with the full range of ’the arts’ – seek, therefore, to disturb and to supplement conventional accounts of justice: raising the difficulty, but also the promise, of that surplus which art reveals: of life over legal formalisation.

Deidre Pribram, Emotions, Genre, and Justice in Film and Television (published March, 2011).

Through their cultural meanings and uses, emotions enable social identities to be created and contested, to
become fixed or alter. Popular narratives often take on emotional significance, aiding groups of people in
recognizing or expressing what they feel and who they are. This book focuses on the justice genres – the generic network of film and television programs that are concerned with crime, law, and social order – to examine how fictional police, detective, and legal stories participate in collectively realized conceptions of emotion. A range of films (Crash, Man on Fire) and television series (Cold Case, Cagney and Lacey) serve as case studies to explore contemporarily relevant representations of anger, fear, loss and consolation, and compassion.

Michael Salter, Carl Schmitt: Law as Politics, Ideology and Strategic Myth (due October 2011).

There has been and continues to be a remarkable revival in academic interest in Carl Schmitt's thought within politics, but this is the first book to address his thought from an explicitly legal theoretical perspective. Transcending the prevailing one-sided and purely historical focus on Schmitt’s significance for debates that took place in the Weimar Republic 1919-1933, this book addresses the actual and potential significance of Schmitt's thought for debates within contemporary Anglo-American legal theory that have emerged during the past three decades. These include: the critique of legal positivism; the ‘indeterminacy thesis’ of American Critical Legal Studies; the reinterpretation of law as a form of strategically disguised politics by the contemporary sociology of law movement; the emphasis upon law as implicated in, and as aspect of, a network of mobile yet dispersed power relationships irreducible to a central state; the legal theoretical critique of human rights and liberalism more generally; Schmitt’s critique of innovations within international criminal law: the inhumanity and hypocrisy of supposedly universalistic ‘crimes against humanity’; and the retrospective criminalisation of ‘aggressive war’ as part of the Nuremberg trials process. In these respects, therefore, Michael Salter provides an overview and assessment of Schmitt's thought, as well as a consideration of its relevance for contemporary legal thought.

Veronique Voruz, Foucault and Criminology: An Introduction (due April, 2011).

[p]rovides an introduction to Michel Foucault, written from the perspective of criminology’s engagement with his work. Foucault’s writing has become a central reference in theoretical and sociological criminology generally and, more specifically, in what Jock Young has called ‘control theory’. The main purpose of this book is to offer a better, clearer and deeper understanding of ongoing criminological debates to both undergraduate and research students in criminology by outlining the theoretical framework which criminologists have taken from Foucault. Its second purpose is to trace the evolution of Foucault’s political project and to counterpose the thrust of his elaborations to the more pedestrian applications of his critical analyses of the present in the field of criminology. In these respects, Foucault and Criminology offers a ’map’ to guide students and practitioners of criminology: both through Foucault’s own writings and those of contemporary criminologists whose work may be characterised as Foucauldian. In so doing, it also pursues the argument that Foucault’s historical and theoretical analyses of discipline, power and governance must be understood in the context of his overall project if criminologists are to avoid reducing Foucault’s radicality, and to reclaim the critical, and resistive, potential of his work.