Is the Miranda warning, which lets an accused know of the right to remain silent, more about procedural fairness or about the conventions of speech acts and silences? Do U.S. laws about Native Americans violate the preferred or traditional "silence" of the peoples whose religions and languages they aim to "protect" and "preserve"? In Just Silences, Marianne Constable draws on such examples to explore what is at stake in modern law: a potentially new silence as to justice.Grounding her claims about (...) modern law in rhetorical analyses of U.S. law and legal texts and locating those claims within the tradition of Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Foucault, Constable asks what we are to make of silences in modern law and justice. She shows how what she calls "sociolegal positivism" is more important than the natural law/positive law distinction for understanding modern law. Modern law is a social and sociological phenomenon, whose instrumental, power-oriented, sometimes violent nature raises serious doubts about the continued possibility of justice. She shows how particular views of language and speech are implicated in such law.But law--like language--has not always been positivist, empirical, or sociological, nor need it be. Constable examines possibilities of silence and proposes an alternative understanding of law--one that emerges in the calling, however silently, of words to justice. Profoundly insightful and fluently written, Just Silences suggests that justice today lies precariously in the silences of modern positive law. (shrink)

As Hannah Arendt has famously argued, politics is a matter of words and deeds. The inability to share language renders politics, which is dependent on speech, impossible. The Trump era not only is symptomatic of a loss of language and of politics, this essay argues, but also reveals an extreme nihilism that is worthy of question and thought. No less a philosopher-rhetorician than Friedrich Nietzsche offers us a diagnosis of this condition, most pithily in the six-moment history of Western philosophy (...) that he presents in Twilight of the Idols.1 Nietzsche frustrates many, offering no prescription, no cure. His history of the "error" that is reason leads into a quandary. In a situation that... (shrink)

In this volume, Simona Goi and Frederick M. Dolan gather stimulating arguments for the indispensability of fiction_including poetry, drama, and film_as irreplaceable sites for wrestling with nature, meaning, shortcomings, and the future of modern politics.

In the midst of the 2020 pandemic produced by an invisible virus, words bring the world near. Words come in from a threatening outside, even as their use turns those who are inside outward. Speech practices reconfigure work and non-work, while politics, like language, turns inside-out.

What are modernities? Can they be critical? What could it mean to imagine law beyond liberalism? This Article considers these questions from within the admittedly-limited scope of law and society in the United States. It argues, using an example drawn from a contemporary state law regulating the practice of law, that the "order of things" has changed. The systematicity of knowledge of modern law links it to the conditions of a sociological society whose stability involves both the management of risk (...) and the prevention of crisis. When interventions such as this Article — in common with modern law—seek to address the critical condition of a modern society and to avert crises in it, such interventions may paradoxically justify and reinforce the very tactics and terms of the expressive environment or system that constitutes modern sociological society. (shrink)