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Nomos And Thanatos (Part B). Feminism As Jurisgenerative Transformation, Or Resistance Through Partial Incorporation?, Richard F. Devlin
Nomos And Thanatos (Part B). Feminism As Jurisgenerative Transformation, Or Resistance Through Partial Incorporation?, Richard F. Devlin
Dalhousie Law Journal
In Part A of this essay, "The Killing Fields", I developed a critique of the disciplinary impulses that underlie modern law and legal theory. Invoking a number of perspectives and a plurality of analyses, I proposed that male-stream legal theory and contemporary law both assume as inevitable, and legitimize as appropriate, the funnelling of violence through law. The problem with a funnel, however, is that it does not curtail or reduce that which is channelled through it. On the contrary, to funnel is to condense and to intensify. Viewed from this perspective, interpreted from the bottom up, law and legal …
Nomos And Thanatos (Part A). The Killing Fields: Modern Law And Legal Theory, Richard F. Devlin
Nomos And Thanatos (Part A). The Killing Fields: Modern Law And Legal Theory, Richard F. Devlin
Dalhousie Law Journal
Law, is so far as it sanctions the coercive power of the state, enables people to do frightening - even deadly - things to each other. Contemporary jurisprudence, the explanatory and justificatory voice of legal practice, fails to interrogate law's interconnection with violence and death and therefore, by a sin of omission, legitimizes humankind's mutual inhumanity. The end result is jurisprudential tolerance of, and acquiescence in, societies underpinned by violence. By identifying the nexus between community (nomos) and death (thanatos), this, admittedly speculative, essay attempts to raise the possibility of a discourse, practice and society that can encourage, reflect and …