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In bringing together accomplished and thoughtful scholars of
different disciplines, with a command of literature ranging from
the legal to the literary, and in relating the works to the central
arguments of the late Professor Robert Cover, Sarat and Kearns have
created a first-rate up-to-date exposition of this important and
complicated issue, namely, how to understand better the violence
implicit and explicit in law.--Legal Studies Forum The relationship
between law and violence is made familiar to us in vivid pictures
of police beating suspects, the large and growing prison
population, and the tenacious attachment to capital punishment in
the United States. Yet the link between law and violence and the
ways that law manages to impose pain and death while remaining
aloof and unstained are an unexplored mystery. Each essay in this
volume considers the question of how violence done by and in the
name of the law differs from illegal or extralegal violence--or,
indeed, if they differ at all. Each author draws on a distinctive
disciplinary tradition-- literature, history, anthropology,
philosophy, political science, or law. Yet each reminds us that
law, constituted in response to the metaphorical violence of the
state of nature, is itself a doer of literal violence. Austin Sarat
is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political
Science and Chair of the Program in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social
Thought, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie
Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.
Assesses the impact of intellectual and political movements of the
late twentieth century on law and legal theory.
We are witnessing in the last decade of the twentieth century more
frequent demands by racial and ethnic groups for recognition of
their distinctive histories and traditions as well as opportunities
to develop and maintain the institutional infrastructure necessary
to preserve them. Where it once seemed that the ideal of American
citizenship was found in the promise of integration and in the hope
that none of us would be singled out for, let alone judged by, our
race or ethnicity, today integration, often taken to mean a denial
of identity and history for subordinated racial, gender, sexual or
ethnic groups, is often rejected, and new terms of inclusion are
sought. The essays in "Cultural Pluralism, Identity Politics, and
the Law" ask us to examine carefully the relation of cultural
struggle and material transformation and law's role in both.
Written by scholars from a variety of disciplines and theoretical
inclinations, the essays challenge orthodox understandings of the
nature of identity politics and contemporary debates about
separatism and assimilation. They ask us to think seriously about
the ways law has been, and is, implicated in these debates. The
essays address questions such as the challenges posed for notions
of legal justice and procedural fairness by cultural pluralism and
identity politics, the role played by law in structuring the terms
on which recognition, accommodation, and inclusion are accorded to
groups in the United States, and how much of accepted notions of
law are defined by an ideal of integration and assimilation.
The contributors are Elizabeth Clark, Lauren Berlant, Dorothy
Roberts, Georg Lipsitz, and Kenneth Karst.
The subject of rights occupies a central place in liberal political
thought. This tradition posits that rights are entitlements of
individuals by virtue of their personhood and that rights stand
apart from politics, that rights in fact hold at bay intrusions of
state policy. The essays in "Identities, Politics, and Rights"
question these assumptions and examine how rights constitute us as
subjects and are, at the same time, implicated in political
struggles. In contrast to the liberal notion of rights'
universality, these essays emphasize the context-specific nature of
rights as well as their constitutive effects.
Recognizing that political disputes throughout the world have
increasingly been cast as arguments about rights, the essays in
this volume examine the varied roles that rights play in political
movements and contests. They argue that rights talk is used by many
different groups primarily because of its fluidity. Certainly
rights can empower individuals and protect them from their
societies, but they also constrain them in other areas. Frequently,
empowerment for one group means disabling rights for another group.
Moreover, focusing on rights can both liberate and limit the
imagination of the possible. By alerting us to this paradox of
rights--empowerment and limitation--"Identities, Politics, and
Rights" illuminates ongoing challenges to rights and reminds us
that rights can both energize political engagement and provide a
resource for defenders of the status quo.
Contributors are Richard Abel, Bruce Ackerman, Wendy Brown, John
Comaroff, Drucilla Cornell, Jane Gaines, Thomas R. Kearns,
Elizabeth Kiss, Kirstie McClure, Sally Merry, Martha Minow, Austin
Sarat, and StevenShiffrin.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence
and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William
H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.
Law is a profession of words. Simultaneously celebratory of great
prose and dogmatically insistent on precise usage, law is a stage
for verbal virtuosity, linguistic mastery, and persuasive argument.
Yet the linguistic display is not without substance: the words of
law take on a seriousness virtually unparalleled in any other
domain of human experience. "The Rhetoric of Law "examines the
words used in legal institutions and proceedings and explores both
the literary aspect of legal life and the role of rhetoric in
shaping the life of the law.
The essays in "The Rhetoric of Law "reflect the diverse influences
of literary theory, feminism, and interpretive social science. Yet
all call into question the rigid separation of rhetoric and justice
that has been characteristic of the philosophical inquiry as far
back as Plato. As a result, they open the way for a new
understanding of law--an understanding that takes language to be
neither esoteric nor frivolous and that views rhetoric as essential
to the pursuit of justice. This volume provides a bracing reminder
of the possibilities and problems of law, of its capacity to engage
the best of human character, and of its vulnerability to cynical
manipulation. Contributors are Lawrence Douglas, Robert A.
Ferguson, Peter Goodrich, Barbara Johnson, Thomas R. Kearns, Austin
Sarat, Adam Thurschwell, James Boyd White, and Lucie White.
Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence
and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William
H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy, Amherst College.
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