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Western legal professionals habitually rely on a version of legal
history that bolsters their own sway over the present. The legal
mythologies undergirding these self-serving proposals are divided
between doctrines of law's immemorial nature, and of its sacred
(Roman) origins. Thomas's de-mythicized jurisprudence dismisses
these sagas.
The first English-language anthology of Yan Thomas, whose
contributions to Roman law revolutionised legal scholarship
Collects and translates 10 essays by Yan Thomas (1943 2008), the
most renowned French jurist of the 20th century Provides a
juridical perspective on the genealogy of the Western subject and
the elementary conditions for the exercise of power Builds on the
growing interest in Thomas' work generated by recent engagements,
such as in Giorgio Agamben's Homo Sacer series Demonstrates the
formal continuity of socio-legal techniques that have defined
Western legal culture Western legal professionals habitually rely
on a version of legal history that bolsters their own sway over the
present. The legal mythologies undergirding these self-serving
proposals are divided between doctrines of law's immemorial nature,
and of its sacred (Roman) origins. Thomas's de-mythicised
jurisprudence, presented in this collection of essays, dismisses
these sagas. His work sent seismic waves across the humanities and
social sciences, with claims including: Law is not a set of rules,
but the operation of legal arguments; lawyers are the agents of the
legal denaturalisation of the world Rome is misread as an
essentially political entity; the effect exercised on Roman society
by its jurists ranks before that of its politicians Despite a
widely accepted opposition between modern labour law and the Roman
renting-out of a slave's workforce, there exist unexpected
commonalities 'Legal order' and 'responsibility' are among the
inventions of modern law; they are not part of the timeless
inventory of the world
Taking the invention as its object of study, this book develops a
radical new perspective on the making of modern patent law. It
develops an extended historical and conceptual exploration of the
invention in modern patent law. Focussing primarily on the figures
that make inventions material, and on how to overcome the
intangibility of ideas, this intellectual challenging book makes
explicit a dimension of patent law that is not commonly found in
traditional commentaries, treatises and cases. The story is told
from the perspective of the material media in which the intangible
form of the invention is made visible; namely, models, texts,
drawings, and biological specimens. This approach brings to light
for the first time some essential formative moments in the history
of patent law. For example, Figures of Invention describes the
central role that scale models played in the making of
nineteenth-century patent jurisprudence, the largely mythical
character of the nineteenth-century theory that patents texts
should function as a means of disclosing inventions, and the
profound conceptual changes that emerged from debates as to how to
represent and disclose the first biological inventions. At the same
time, this historical inquiry also reveals the basic conceptual
architecture of modern patent law. The story of how inventions were
represented is also the story of the formation of the modern
concept of invention, or of the historical processes that shaped
the terms in which patent lawyers still apprehend the intangible
form of the invention. Although the analysis focuses on the history
of patent law in the United States, it develops themes that
illuminate the evolution of patent regimes in Europe. In combining
close historical analysis with broad thematic reflection, Figures
of Invention makes a distinctive contribution both to the field of
patent law scholarship and to emerging interdisciplinary debates
about the constitution of patent law and of intellectual property
in general.
This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons
and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by
legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and
anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific
institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and
thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter
between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties
about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to
resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its
treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the
transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes
western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison
between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal
artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance
at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology,
finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons
and things.
This collection of interdisciplinary essays explores how persons
and things - the central elements of the social - are fabricated by
legal rituals and institutions. The contributors, legal and
anthropological theorists alike, focus on a set of specific
institutional and ethnographic contexts, and some unexpected and
thought-provoking analogies emerge from this intellectual encounter
between law and anthropology. For example, contemporary anxieties
about the legal status of the biotechnological body seem to
resonate with the questions addressed by ancient Roman law in its
treatment of dead bodies. The analogy between copyright and the
transmission of intangible designs in Melanesia suddenly makes
western images of authorship seem quite unfamiliar. A comparison
between law and laboratory science presents the production of legal
artefacts in new light. These studies are of particular relevance
at a time when law, faced with the inventiveness of biotechnology,
finds it increasingly difficult to draw the line between persons
and things.
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