"Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. Legal Discourse provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and `legalese' more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sign are examined and assessed. In the second part the (...) contemporary disciples of linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies are brought to bear upon the task of constructing a theory of legal discourse as a linguistics of legal power" -- Backcover. (shrink)

An original and comprehensive study of the history, symbols and languages of the common law tradition.

_Oedipus Lex_ offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions—the poets, women, and outsiders—that legal science has left in its wake. Goodrich (...) analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law. (shrink)

From early in his career Jacques Derrida was intrigued by law. Over time, this fascination with law grew more manifest and he published a number of highly influential analyses of ethics, justice, violence and law. This book brings together leading scholars in a variety of disciplines to assess Derrida's importance for and impact upon legal studies.

It is rare in the extreme for a judge to embed an enigma, here an intentionally encrypted message, in the text of a judgment. Using the occasion of the cypher inserted into the judgment of Peter Smith J in Baigent v Random House, this article patiently reconstructs the humanist concept of aenigmata iuris or legal enigmas so as properly to interpret this recent use. Legal enigmas are shown to be the residues of forgotten histories, references to lost texts, marks left (...) by encounters between law and its now marginal literary and poetic sources. Where current legal use treats enigmas as mere obscurities, this article argues that the enigma should be apprehended and appreciated as an image of juristic invention, the moment of devising a decision, the instant of creative encounter between ‘the sciences liberall’, doctrine and law. (shrink)

Law and the Unconscious: A Legendre Reader is e first work of the French legal philosopher Pierre Legendre to appear in English. Trained as a lawyer, a historian and a psychoanalyst, the work of Pierre Legendre has consistently confronted law with the teaching and methods of psychoanalysis. The present collection of essays addresses a fascinating and diverse set of themes including the doctrinal regulation of tears, dance and law, the desire for the absolute, the war of the texts, and the (...) power of the images. (shrink)

The papers selected for this volume offer a panorama of problems and methods at the intersection of legal theory and the humanities. The issues addressed include the role of the emotions and the imagination in legal reasoning, and the protection of the diversity of voices and perspective in the name of community. The articles balance renewed calls to humanise legal theory with those that analyse and explore the relevance of specific domains of the humanities - such as literature, architecture, music, (...) painting, drawing and film - for law. (shrink)

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, the essays move from the translation (...) and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. The book brings contemporary critique to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake. (shrink)

David Gray Carlson and Peter Goodrich argue that the postmodern legal mind can be characterized as having shifted the focus of legal analysis away from the modernist understanding of law as a system that is unitary and separate from other aspects of culture and society. In exploring the various "other dimensions" of law, scholars have developed alternative species of legal analysis and recognized the existence of different forms of law. Carlson and Goodrich assert that the postmodern legal mind introduced a (...) series of "minor jurisprudences" or partial forms of legal knowledge, which both compete with and subvert the modernist conception of a unitary system of law. In doing so scholars from a variety of disciplines pursue the implications of applying the insights of their disciplines to law. Carlson and Goodrich have assembled in this volume essays from some of our leading thinkers that address what is arguably one of the most fundamental of interdisciplinary encounters, that of psychoanalysis and law. While psychoanalytic interpretations of law are by no means a novelty within common law jurisprudence, the extent and possibilities of the terrain opened up by psychoanalysis have yet to be extensively addressed. The intentional subject and "reasonable man" of law are disassembled in psychoanalysis to reveal a chaotic and irrational libidinal subject, a sexual being, a body and its drives. The focus of the present collection of essays is upon desire as an inner law, upon love as an interior idiom of legality, and represents a signficant and at times surprising development of the psychoanalytic analysis of legality. These essays should appeal to scholars in law and in psychology. The contributors are Drucilla Cornell, Jacques Derrida, Peter Goodrich, Pierre Legendre, Alain Pottage, Michel Rosenfeld, Renata Salecl, Jeanne L. Schroeder, Anton Schutz, Henry Staten, and Slavoj Zizek. David Gray Carlson is Professor of Law, Benjamin Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University. Peter Goodrich is Professor of Law, University of London and University of California, Los Angeles. (shrink)

Nietzsche and Legal Theory is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, criminology, cultural studies, and literary studies) demonstrate and (...) enact the sort of creativity that Nietzsche associated with the "free-spirits" to whom he addressed some of his most significant work. (shrink)

A judge springs out of his car on the way to court in downtown Chicago and takes photographs of an inflatable rat. A while later he inserts these photographs into a decision involving another inflatable rodent. Judges now regularly insert pictures in judgments, but there is no study either of the genres or the precedential status of these modern visual emblemata, these pictorial interventions in the record. Using a comparative visual corpus of over three hundred images extracted from diverse common (...) law jurisdictions, the practice of retinal justice, the novelty of vision in decision, is here anatomized, choreographed, and critically classified. (shrink)

In academic contexts, it is always likely thatan author who criticises another's work – in abook review, or an article – will know theother author personally. They may well befriends. Reflecting upon the intimacy of thepublic sphere, this article responds to thetone of a recent critique of the style andpolitics of postmodern jurisprudence. Questionsof style, tone and scriptural face are anunconventional point of entry into a discussionof feminism, aesthetics and law. It is arguedhere that these issues are intrinsic to theembodiment (...) of theory that Barron proposes. (shrink)

A recent collection of essays,Feminist Perspectives on Law and Theory,is here taken as the starting point for an analysis of the political trajectory of feminist jurisprudence. The ‘new wave’ of feminism borrows much of its inspiration from continental theory – from Derrida, Deleuze and Irigaray – and has been subject to criticism for its attention to language and its turn towards culture and aesthetics. Reviewing the materialist bases of the new wave, and particularly its concern with the immediacies of the (...) body and events, it is argued here that it represents a return to the radicalism of feminist legal theory. (shrink)