Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places
Justice Beyond and Between
Published by: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of
Series: Berkeley Forum in the Humanities
272 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm, 28
Edited by Marianne Constable, Leti Volpp and Bryan Wagner
Contributions by Kathryn Abrams, Daniel Boyarin, Wendy Brown, Marianne Constable, Samera Esmeir, Daniel Fisher, Sara Ludin, Saba Mahmood, Rebecca McLennan, Ramona Naddaff, Beth Piatote, Sarah Song, Christopher Tomlins, Leti Volpp and Bryan Wagner
Published by: Townsend Center for the Humanities, University of
Series: Berkeley Forum in the Humanities
272 pages, 152.00 x 228.00 mm, 28
For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the “wrong places”—sites and spaces in which no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law’s constraints.
Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places brings together essays by leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric, to look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture.
Many essays in this volume look for law precisely in the kinds of “wrong places” where there appears to be no law. They find in these places not only reflections and remains of law, but also rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and about law’s meaning and function. Other essays do the opposite: rather than looking for law in places where law does not obviously appear, they look in statute books and courtrooms from perspectives that are usually presumed to have nothing to say about law.
Looking at law sideways, or upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can gain when law is denied its ostensibly proper domain.
Contributors: Kathryn Abrams, Daniel Boyarin, Wendy Brown, Marianne Constable, Samera Esmeir, Daniel Fisher, Sara Ludin, Saba Mahmood, Rebecca McLennan, Ramona Naddaff, Beth Piatote, Sarah Song, Christopher Tomlins, Leti Volpp, Bryan Wagner
Introduction
Marianne Constable, Leti Volpp, and Bryan Wagner, 1
Places
1. The Wild Life of Law: Domesticating Nature in the Bering Sea, c. 1893
Rebecca M. McLennan, 15
2. Before Emptiness: On the Destructiveness and Impotence of Law
Samera Esmeir, 37
3. Spun Dry: Mobility and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia
Daniel Fisher, 62
4. Signs of Authority in Indian Country
Beth H. Piatote, 85
Membership
5. Signs of Law
Leti Volpp, 103
6. After Obergefell: On Marriage and Belonging in Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding
Sarah Song, 131
7. Secularism, Family Law, and Gender Inequality
Saba Mahmood, 145
Religion
8. When Persons Become Firms and Firms Become Persons: Neoliberal Jurisprudence and Evangelical Christianity in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
Wendy Brown, 169
9. Is There Jewish Law? The Case of Josephus
Daniel Boyarin, 189
10. The Protestant Power of Attorney of 1531: A Legalistic History of the Early Reformation in Germany
Sara Ludin, 201
11. Looking for Law in The Confessions of Nat Turner
Christopher Tomlins, 225
Performance
12. A Vigil at the End of the World
Kathryn Abrams, 247
13. Invention and Process in Bilski
Marianne Constable, 258
14. “Erudite Curiosity”: The Trial of Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Publisher of the Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade, Paris 1958
Ramona Naddaff, 273
15. The Trial of Romeo Rosebud
Bryan Wagner, 287
List of Contributors, 299
Index, 303
Marianne Constable is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford), Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton), and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law, and Knowledge (Chicago).
Leti Volpp is Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. She is also the director of the UC Berkeley Center for Race and Gender. She is the co-editor of Legal Borderlands: Law and American Borders (Johns Hopkins) and writes about immigration law, citizenship theory, feminist theory and critical race studies.
Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Harvard), The Tar Baby: A Global History (Princeton), and The Life and Legend of Bras-Coupé: The Fugitive Slave Who Fought the Law, Ruled the Swamp, Danced the Bamboula, Invented Jazz, and Died for Love (LSU).
Kathryn Abrams is the Herma Hill Kay Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley. Her scholarship focuses on feminist jurisprudence.
Wendy Brown is Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is also affiliated with the Program in Critical Theory. Among her many book titles are Regulating Aversion: Tolerance in the Age of Empire and Identity (Princeton University Press, 2006), Walled States, Waning Sovereignty (Zone Books, 2010), Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (Zone Books, 2015), and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Anti-Democratic Politics in the West (Columbia University Press, 2019).
Samera Esmeir is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. Her first book is Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (2012). She is working on a book that examines the encounter between revolutions and different legal traditions since the eighteenth century.
Daniel Fisher is a lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University.
Sara Ludin is a PhD candidate in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at the University of California, Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the Reformation via dispute resolution in the courts. She argues that courts provided one setting in which various parties were called upon to articulate, in the course of settling mundane disputes, what counted as a “matter of religion.”
Rebecca McLennan is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley. Her research focuses on North America with an emphasis on nineteenth- and twentieth-century U.S. legal, social, and, in more recent years, environmental history. Her current book project, “The Wild Life of Law: The Bering Sea Crisis and the Legal Construction of Nature,” brings environmental, legal, and international history together via a study of the conflict between the U.S., Britain, Canada, Russia, and Japan over the legal status of the Bering Sea and its biota in the late nineteenth century.
Ramona Naddaff is an associate professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley, director of the Art of Writing at the Townsend Center of the Humanities, and an editor and director of Zone Books. Author of Exiling the Poets (2003), she is currently working on a book provisionally titled “A Writer’s Trials: On the Writing, Editing and Censorship of Madame Bovary.”
Beth Piatote is an associate professor of Native American studies and affiliated faculty in American studies and the Department of Linguistics at University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Domestic Subjects: Gender, Citizenship, and Law in Native American Literature (2013). Her current work focuses on the animation of Indigenous law in literature, Indigenous language revitalization, and Nez Perce language and literature.
Sarah Song is a political theorist with a special interest in issues of membership and migration. She teaches in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at UC Berkeley Law School and is the author of Immigration and the Limits of Democracy (2018).
Christopher Tomlins is the Elizabeth Josselyn Boalt Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and an affiliated research professor of the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. His research concentrates on Anglo-American legal history from the sixteenth to the twentieth centuries. His most recent book is Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought (2017), coedited with Justin Desautels-Stein, and he is currently working on a history of the Turner Rebellion and slavery in antebellum Virginia.
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