The very idea of such a neutral system is an illusion. Rather, what is needed, Julen Etxabe argues in this book, is a heightened awareness of the difficulty of judgment.

In lines 904-15 Antigone states that she acted against the citizens on behalf of her brother, but would not do so in the case of a husband or child. I suggest that what separates Polyneices’s case from the hypothetical one of a husband or child is the fact that Polyneices is the last brother of a family on the verge of extinction. This situation demands a special consideration that is absent in the alternative scenario Antigone imagines. I show that Antigone (...) is here formulating what she thinks is a socially validated norm that legitimizes her disobedience. (shrink)

This book is the first to approach Jacques Rancière’s work from a legal perspective. A former student of Louis Althusser, Rancière is one of the most important contemporary French philosophers of recent decades: offering an original and path-breaking way to think politics, democracy and aesthetics. Rancière’s work has received wide and increasing critical attention, but no study exists so far that reflects on the wider implications of Rancière for law and for socio-legal studies. Although Rancière does not pay much specific (...) attention to law—and there is a strong temptation to identify law with what he terms the "police order"—much of Rancière’s historical work highlights the creative potential of law and legal language. Indeed, he repeatedly offers powerful instances of what Robert Cover labelled _jurisgenesis, _of norm-generation, with important legal implications and ramifications. So, rather than excavate the Rancièrean corpus for isolated statements about the law, this volume reverses such a method and asks: what would a Rancière-inspired legal theory look like? Bringing together specialists and scholars in different areas of law, critical theory and philosophy, this rethinking of law and socio-legal studies _through_ Rancière provides an original and important engagement with a range of contemporary legal topics, including constituent power, constitutional interpretation, the judicialization of politics, legal subjectivity, conflicts, human rights, the nomos of modernity, globalization, and the sensory configurations of law. It will, then, be of considerable interest to those working in these areas. (shrink)