Author: Marianne Constable
File Type: pdf
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 placessites 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 laws 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 laws 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**ReviewThis extraordinary collection is a veritable lost and found of laws traces. Moving across disciplines, it offers rich and surprising refractions of laws ephemera What do we learn about the opacity of governance when we look for justice beyond its expected place in the confines of textual or rhetorical jurisprudence? What is revealed when the legal inhabits the sacred, informs the literary, performs geography, polices time, seeps through the agora, regenerates itself within bodies? This indispensable book excavates how seemingly robust juridical processes may teeter in concert with more fragile norms for mobility, status, and human affinity. (Patricia J. Williams, Columbia Law School) From the Back CoverThis extraordinary collection is a veritable lost and found of laws traces. Moving across disciplines, it offers rich and surprising refractions of laws ephemera What do we learn about the opacity of governance when we look for justice beyond its expected place in the confines of textual or rhetorical jurisprudence? What is revealed when the legal inhabits the sacred, informs the literary, performs geography, polices time, seeps through the agora, regenerates itself within bodies? This indispensable book excavates how seemingly robust juridical processes may teeter in concert with more fragile norms for mobility, status, and human affinity.Patricia J. Williams, Columbia Law SchoolFor many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the wrong placessites and spaces where 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 laws constraints.In this book leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, they show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture.Many contributors examine places where there appears to be no law, finding 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 laws meaning and function. Other essays look in the more common placesstatute books and courtroomsbut from perspectives that are usually presumed to have nothing to say about law.Looking at law sideways, upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can gain when law is denied its ostensibly proper domain. Marianne Constable is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley.Leti Volpp is Robert D. and Leslie Kay Raven Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley.Bryan Wagner is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.