![]() |
![]() |
Your cart is empty |
||
Showing 1 - 18 of 18 matches in All Departments
This volume gathers a collection of the most seminal essays written by leading experts in the fields of law, and cultural studies, which address the cultural dimension of trials. Taken together, these essays conceive of trials as sites of legal performance and as critical public spaces in which the law both encounters and interacts dialogically with the culture in which it is embedded. Inquiring into the contours of that dialogic relation, these essays trace the paths of cultural stories as they circulate in and through trial settings, examine how trials emerge out of particular social and historical contexts, and suggest ways in which trials themselves, as both singular events and generic forms, circulate and signify in culture.
The study of catastrophe is a growth industry. Today, cosmologists
scan the heavens for asteroids of the kind that smashed into earth
some ninety million years ago, leading to the swift extinction of
the dinosaurs. Climatologists create elaborate models of the
chaotic weather and vast flooding that will result from the
continued buildup of greenhouse gases in the planet's atmosphere.
Terrorist experts and homeland security consultants struggle to
prepare for a wide range of possible biological, chemical, and
radiological attacks: aerated small pox virus spread by a crop
duster, botulism dumped into an urban reservoir, a dirty bomb
detonated in a city center.
When citizens think about law's ways of knowing and about how legal officials gather information, assess factual claims, and judge people and situations, they are often confused by the seemingly arcane and constrained quality of the information-gathering, fact-evaluating procedures that legal officials employ or impose. Yet, law's ways of knowing are as varied as the institutions and officials who populate any legal system. From the rules of evidence to the technologies of risk management, from the practices of racial profiling to the development of trade knowledge, from the generation of independent knowledge practices to law's dependence on outside expertise, even a brief survey shows that law knows in many different ways, that its knowledge practices are contingent and responsive to context, and that they change over time.
How and why has the concept of responsibility come to pervade the fabric of American public and private life? How are ideas of responsibility instantiated in, and constituted by, the workings of social and political institutions? What place do liberal discourses of responsibility, based on the individual, have in today's biopolitical world, where responsibility is so often a matter of risk assessment, founded in statistical probabilities? Bringing together the work of scholars in anthropology, law, literary studies, philosophy, and political theory, the essays in this volume show how state and private bureaucracies play crucial roles in fashioning forms of responsibility, which they then enjoin on populations. How do government and market constitute subjects of responsibility in a culture so enamored of individuality? In what ways can those entities-centrally, in modern culture, those engaged in insuring individuals against loss or harm-themselves be held responsible, and by whom? What kinds of subjectivities are created in this process? Can such subjects be said to be truly responsible, and in what sense?
The possibility of law in the absence of a nation would seem to
strip law from its source of meaning and value. At the same time,
law divorced from nations would clear the ground for a cosmopolitan
vision in which the prejudices or idiosyncrasies of distinctive
national traditions would give way to more universalist groundings
for law. These alternately dystopian and utopian viewpoints inspire
this original collection of essays on law without nations.
"The Secrets of Law" explores the ways law both traffics in and
regulates secrecy. Taking a close look at the opacity built into
legal and governance processes, it explores the ways law produces
zones of secrecy, the relation between secrecy and justice, and how
we understand the inscrutability of law's processes.
Law calls communities into being and constitutes the "we" it
governs. This act of defining produces an outside as well as an
inside, a border whose crossing is guarded, maintaining the
identity, coherence, and integrity of the space and people within.
Those wishing to enter must negotiate a complex terrain of
defensive mechanisms, expectations, assumptions, and legal
proscriptions. Essentially, law enforces the boundary between
inside and outside in both physical and epistemological ways.
This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law's relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force.
The proliferation of images of law, legal processes, and officials on television and in film is a phenomenon of enormous significance. Mass-mediated images are as powerful, pervasive, and important as are other early twenty-first-century social forces - e.g. globalization, neo-colonialism, and human rights - in shaping and transforming legal life. Yet scholars have only recently begun to examine how law works in this new arena and to explore the consequences of the representation of law in the moving image. Law on the Screen advances our understanding of the connection between law and film by analyzing them as narrative forms, examining film for its jurisprudential content - that is, its ways of critiquing the present legal world and imagining an alternative one - and expanding studies of the representation of law in film to include questions of reception. The Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought
"Law and the Utopian Imagination" seeks to explore and resuscitate
the notion of utopianism within current legal discourse. The idea
of utopia has fascinated the imaginations of important thinkers for
ages. And yet--who writes seriously on the idea of utopia today?
"Law and War" explores the cultural, historical, spatial, and
theoretical dimensions of the relationship between law and war--a
connection that has long vexed the jurisprudential imagination.
Historically the term "war crime" struck some as redundant and
others as oxymoronic: redundant because war itself is criminal;
oxymoronic because war submits to no law. More recently, the
remarkable trend toward the juridification of warfare has emerged,
as law has sought to stretch its dominion over every aspect of the
waging of armed struggle. No longer simply a tool for judging
battlefield conduct, law now seeks to subdue warfare and to enlist
it into the service of legal goals. Law has emerged as a force that
stands over and above war, endowed with the power to authorize and
restrain, to declare and limit, to justify and condemn.
Imagining New Legalities reminds us that examining the right to privacy and the public/private distinction is an important way of mapping the forms and limits of power that can legitimately be exercised by collective bodies over individuals and by governments over their citizens. This book does not seek to provide a comprehensive overview of threats to privacy and rejoinders to them. Instead it considers several different conceptions of privacy and provides examples of legal inventiveness in confronting some contemporary challenges to the public/private distinction. It provides a context for that consideration by surveying the meanings of privacy in three domains--the first, involving intimacy and intimate relations; the second, implicating criminal procedure, in particular, the 4th amendment; and the third, addressing control of information in the digital age. The first two provide examples of what are taken to be classic breaches of the public/private distinction, namely instances when government intrudes in an area claimed to be private. The third has to do with voluntary circulation of information and the question of who gets to control what happens to and with that information.
Law depends on various modes of classification. How an act or a
person is classified may be crucial in determining the rights
obtained, the procedures employed, and what understandings get
attached to the act or person. Critiques of law often reveal how
arbitrary its classificatory acts are, but no one doubts their
power and consequence.
The specter of the sacred always haunts the law, even in the most resolute of contemporary secular democracies. Indeed, the more one considers the question of the relation between law and the sacred, the more it appears that endless debate over the proper relationship of government to religion is only the most quotidian example of a problematic that lies at the heart of law itself. And currently, as some in the United States grapple with the seeming fragility of secular democracy in the face of threatening religious fundamentalisms, the question has gained a particular urgency. This book explores questions about the fundamental role of the sacred in the constitution of law, historically and theoretically. It examines contemporary efforts to separate law from the sacred and asks: How did the division of law and sacred come to be, in what ways, and with what effects? In doing so, it highlights the ambivalent place of the sacred in the self-image of modern states and jurisprudence. For if it is the case that, particularly in the developed West, contemporary law posits a fundamental conceptual divide between sacred and secular, it nevertheless remains true that the assertion of that divide has its own history, one that defines Western modernity itself.
Weapons have been a source of political and legal debate for centuries. Aristotle considered the possession of arms a fundamental source of political power and wrote that tyrants ""mistrust the people and deprive them of their arms."" Today ownership of weapons - whether handguns or military-grade assault weapons - poses more acute legal problems than ever before. In this volume, the editors' introduction traces the history of gun control in the United States, arguing that until the 1980s courts upheld reasonable gun control measures. The contributors confront urgent questions, among them the usefulness of history as a guide in ongoing struggles over gun regulation, the changing meaning of the Second Amendment, the perspective of law enforcement on guns and gun control law, and individual and relational perspectives on gun rights. The contributors include the editors and Carl T. Bogus, Jennifer Carlson, Saul Cornell, Darrell A.H. Miller, Laura Beth Nielsen, and Katherine Shaw.
Key binaries like public/private and speech/conduct are mainstays of the liberal legal system. However, the pairing of criminal/enemy has received little scholarly attention by comparison. Bringing together a group of distinguished and disciplinarily diverse scholars, Criminals and Enemies, the most recent volume in the Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, addresses this gap in the literature. Drawing on political philosophy, legal analysis, and historical research, this essential volume reveals just how central the criminal/enemy distinction is to the structure and practice of contemporary law. The editors' introduction situates criminals and enemies in a theoretical context, focusing on the work of Thomas Hobbes and Carl Schmitt, while other essays consider topics ranging from Germany's denazification project to South Africa's pre- and post-apartheid legal regime to the complicating factors introduced by the war on terror. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Stephen Clingman, Jennifer Daskal, Sara Kendall, Devin Pendas, and Annette Weinke.
Drawing on the rich field of performance studies, this volume, the most recent contribution to the distinguished Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, offers fresh insights and a provocative mix of multidisciplinary topics and methodologies to explore the theatricality and performativity of law as more than a metaphor. In considering law through the lens of performance studies, the contributors in this volume emphasize the embodied, affective, and reiterative qualities that move law off the printed page and into the thick world of lived experience. They consider the blurring of lines between performance and the enactment of law, the transformative exchanges between the law and its many and varied stagings, and the impact or resonance of performativity in situations where innocence and guilt may be determined. In addition to the editors, the contributors include Joshua Chambers-Letson, Catherine M. Cole, Ryan Hartigan, Lara D. Nielsen, Julie Stone Peters, Ann Pellegrini, and Karen Shimakawa.
Changes in technology, in society, and in your role as a library media specialist have spawned hundreds of new words, phrases, and acronyms. Where can you find their meanings? This dictionary was created to provide a single source of definitions for the language specifically associated with your profession. It covers all the basic terminology-words, phrases, and acronyms-you need for the daily operation of a K-12 school library media center. There are terms related to librarianship and publishing (access point, inquiry learning, incunabula, taxonomy), technology (gigabyte, microLIF), awards (Edwards, Alex, Children's Choices), organizations (Children's Book Council, LITA), celebrations (Children's Book Week), and more. Practical, thorough, and easy to use, this book is a ready-reference you'll use again and again.
|
![]() ![]() You may like...
|