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Introduction, P. Pether, A. Sarat
Introduction, P. Pether, A. Sarat
Law Text Culture
When we were asked by Desmond Manderson, the Managing Editor of Law/Text/Culture, to edit this special edition of Law/Text/Culture we tried to find scholars working in North America -- established and new alike -- who were either doing particularly interesting interdisciplinary work in law and the humanities or who were interested in essaying this kind of work for the first time. We looked for scholars situated both inside and outside the legal academy, and above all for people who were interested in working across different genres and modes of texts and at the same time exploring issues that implicate law …
Cruel And Unusual: Parsing The Meaning Of Punishment, J. Dyan
Cruel And Unusual: Parsing The Meaning Of Punishment, J. Dyan
Law Text Culture
If Foucault's metropolitan world of public torture--"the great spectacle of physical punishment,"--died out by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the punitive spectacle and its requisite bodies were resurrected in the colonies. Given the lack of precedents in English law, the speed with which the institution of slavery took shape in the United States and the severity of the laws that effected it are exceptional. Although strategies of divestment were already present in the rights of property and privilege at common law, and later tied to the definition of property in persons; black slaves, regarded as outside the social order, …
Scarlett O'Hara As Feminist: The Contradictory, Normalizing Force Of Law And Culture, J. M. Spanbauer
Scarlett O'Hara As Feminist: The Contradictory, Normalizing Force Of Law And Culture, J. M. Spanbauer
Law Text Culture
Many women, particularly feminists, find Scarlett O'Hara, from Gone with the Wind 2 (Mitchell 1936), at best irritating, and at worst, despicable: a character who embodies all of the negative stereotypes attributed to women throughout history. She is narcissistic, shallow, dishonest, manipulative, amoral, and completely lacking in any capacity for self-reflection and for analysis of the emotional and psychological responses of others. In fact, even Margaret Mitchell, who did not much care for the character she had created, often made "disparaging remarks about Scarlett" (Jones 1981: 333) and "claimed that she set out to write about Melanie as the protagonist …
Semantic Ecology And Lexical Violence: Nature At The Limits Of Law, D. Delaney
Semantic Ecology And Lexical Violence: Nature At The Limits Of Law, D. Delaney
Law Text Culture
This essay addresses two related questions. Each asks, in different ways, to what extent might we know law by the company that it doesn't keep? The first, given the theme of this special issue, concerns the comparative underdevelopment of interdisciplinary work involving legal scholarship and (critical) human geography. The second, raised, in part, in response to the first, concerns a more fundamental tendency in legal thought and practice to constitute the domain of the legal in opposition to physicality. Clearly, theoretical stipulations of the domain of the specifically legal have frequently been founded on its asserted contrasts with, say, politics, …
Lies On The Lips: Dying Declarations, Western Legal Bias, And Unreliability As Reported Speech, B. A. Liang, A. C. Liang
Lies On The Lips: Dying Declarations, Western Legal Bias, And Unreliability As Reported Speech, B. A. Liang, A. C. Liang
Law Text Culture
When one party is killed by another, there are often no witnesses to the murder other than the killer and the victim who is now absent. In some circumstances, the victim has enough life left to utter some final words to an individual who happens to be in the vicinity of the crime. Usually these statements, known in legal terms as dying declarations, relate to the circumstances of the victim's death, including the identity of the perpetrator. If the crime is investigated by law enforcement authorities, the final words of the victim can be reported by the individual who received …
The Semiotics Of Photographic Evidence, A. Kibbey
The Semiotics Of Photographic Evidence, A. Kibbey
Law Text Culture
What makes evidence credible? This question is central to the operation of a legal system because it has so much to do with winning or losing a case. Credibility often hinges on semiotic elements of a trial that are not recognized by law, but which every lawyer recognizes as crucial to the presentation of a case. This semiotic dimension of a case is generally perceived as notoriously unpredictable in its impact. Judges and juries can bestow credibility or withhold it based on a witness's sweating brow, fidgeting hands, tone of voice, the racial and gender characteristics of every person involved …
Language As Mimesis, L. E. Volcher
Language As Mimesis, L. E. Volcher
Law Text Culture
This essay brings the idea that language is mimesis, in something like the Greek sense, into contact with certain Eastern images and ideas. Heidegger defined mimesis, well enough for my purposes, as the presentation or production of something in a manner that is typical of something else. (Heidegger 1991, vol I: 173) Keeping this image of mimesis in mind, I want to extend to language the inversion of traditional aesthetic theory that Nietzsche accomplished when he thought of art from the point of view of the artist--the creator of images--rather than from the point of view of the one who …
Interdisciplinarity As Reading: Truth Commission Journal And Notes, M. Sanders
Interdisciplinarity As Reading: Truth Commission Journal And Notes, M. Sanders
Law Text Culture
August 5, 1998: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is holding an amnesty hearing at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg. The hearing is a continuation of one held in May, concerning the events now remembered as the Shell House incident.2 In March 1994, security guards from the African National Congress headquarters at Shell House, an office building in the middle of Johannesburg, fired their guns at a large contingent of Zulu marchers, some armed with "traditional weapons": cow-hide shields, sticks, clubs, spears.3 Eight marchers died, and the guards have applied for amnesty. A witness, one of the marchers, is being …
Rhetoric And Somatics: Training The Body To Do The Work Of Law, P. Goodrich
Rhetoric And Somatics: Training The Body To Do The Work Of Law, P. Goodrich
Law Text Culture
In a passage of the Lawiers Logike that is ostensibly concerned with the rhetorical figures of description, Abraham Fraunce surprisingly defines "chronographia," the description of time, by reference to its antithesis. Citing "Master Lambard", Fraunce gives the following example: "an arrest is a certain restraint of a man's person, depriving it of his own will and liberty, and binding it to become obedient to the will of the law; and it may be called the beginning of imprisonment."1 (1588a: 64r) Stasis or arrestation of the body is here used ironically to exemplify interruption of the essentially incorporeal passage of time. …
Friendship, Tradition, Democracy: Two Readings Of Aristotle, A. Thurschwell
Friendship, Tradition, Democracy: Two Readings Of Aristotle, A. Thurschwell
Law Text Culture
In a short speech published in 1988 entitled "The Politics of Friendship," Jacques Derrida concluded with a distinction between two models of friendship, exemplified by Aristotle and Cicero on one hand and Montaigne on the other, and suggested that these two models lead toward different notions of politics: The Greco-Roman model [of friendship] appears to be marked by the value of reciprocity, by a homological, immanentist, finitist, and politicist concord. Montaigne (whom we are reading here as the example of a paradigm) doubtless inherits the majority of these traits. But he breaks the reciprocity therein and discreetly introduces, so it …
Discovering A Judicial Story, L. H. Larue
Discovering A Judicial Story, L. H. Larue
Law Text Culture
We all know that stories create culture and that law creates culture; it may well follow (this is only a probabilistic judgment) that the stories that one finds in judicial opinions might be especially powerful in creating culture. There are two problems with the thesis that judicial storytelling can be powerful. The first problem is that ordinary citizens do not read these stories and could only hear about them through the mediation of television and the newspapers. This objection is factually correct; judicial opinions do not speak directly to the average citizen. However, the objection errs in supposing that the …
Admitting The Stranger: The Rule Of Law, The Ethics Of Medical Hospitality And The Borders Of Governmental Imagination In Nineteenth Century France, S. Schafer
Law Text Culture
This essay takes as its point of departure a pair of perennial questions in western ethics: How might we know "the stranger"? What dictates proper behavior toward him or her? (Ogletree 1985) These ethical questions are also essential questions of culture, economics, law and diplomacy. They have inspired empathetic philosophical reflections, most notably in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1998), theoretical work on difference, language, and subjectivity (Derrida 1998; Kristeva 1988), and literary explorations of human difference and alienation, most famously in Camus's The Stranger. ([1946] 1988; see also Stamelman on Jabes 1993) In Europe and North America, the …
Black Letters And Black Rams: Fictionalizing Law And Legalizing Literature In Enlightenment England, S. S. Heinzelman
Black Letters And Black Rams: Fictionalizing Law And Legalizing Literature In Enlightenment England, S. S. Heinzelman
Law Text Culture
This spectacle of the promiscuous widow is described in a legal self-help book printed for women (and, in this case, by a woman). It was designed, claims its anonymous author, to inform the "fair Sex . . . how to preserve their Lands, Goods and most valuable Effects" (vii). Mixed in with this "serious matter" are anecdotes from customary law, provided by the author as "Things of Entertainment" (vi), of which this story of the widow-whore is one. In Patrick O'Brian's contemporary historical romance, The Mauritius Command, set in 1810 during the Napoleonic Wars, we find a re-enactment of the …
Left (Over) Rights, D. Roithmayr
Left (Over) Rights, D. Roithmayr
Law Text Culture
As an intellectual movement in legal scholarship, Critical Race Theory ("CRT") was formally inaugurated twelve years ago, at a 1989 critical theory conference in Madison Wisconsin. Although the movement had its own historical narrative of development (Crenshaw 1995: xvii-xxvii), it had inherited much of its direction and methodology from two immediate intellectual precursors, the civil rights and critical legal studies ("CLS") movements. (xix) From the latter, CRT had adopted the critique of modern liberal legal consciousness, and in particular, the argument that law was reflected and reinforced the exercise of power by elites. From the former, CRT had drawn a …