Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought

Justin Desautels-Stein is Associate Professor of Law, University of Colorado. His published works have appeared in many well-respected journals, including Law and Contemporary Problems, International Theory, The American Journal of Legal History, and Law and Critique. His first book, The Jurisprudence of Style: A Structuralist History of American Pragmatism and Liberal Legal Thought (Cambridge) is forthcoming. Christopher Tomlins is Elizabeth J. Boalt Professor of Law, at the University of California, Berkeley. His books include Freedom, Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (2010); Law, Labor, and Ideology in the Early American Republic (1993); and The State and the Unions: Labor Relations, Law, and the Organized Labor Movement in America, 1880-1960 (1985). He has been awarded the Littleton-Griswold Prize of the American Historical Association, the Hurst Prize of the Law and Society Association (twice), the Reid Prize of the American Society for Legal History, and the Bancroft Prize of the Trustees of Columbia University.

'In this strikingly provocative collection, an international group of some of the most interesting and original minds in the legal academy asks whether there is such a thing as 'contemporary legal thought', or only the shards and fragments of exhausted prior movements and systems. Some contributors see only the ruins; others, possibilities for making postmodern pastiches out of the fragments; still others point to wildflowers - prospects for novel approaches to understanding law that may someday crystallize into more general theories. The book is designed to disturb conventional views of law and legal theory; and it does so, with panache.' Robert W. Gordon, Stanford Law School, California

• Introduction: searching for contemporary legal thought: history, image and structure Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins; Part I. Histories of the Legal Contemporary: 1. Of origin: toward a history of contemporary legal thought Christopher Tomlins; 2. Who are we? Persona, office, suspicion and critique Peter Goodrich; 3. On the hinges of history: for a relational legal historiography Maks Del Mar; 4. Contemporary legal genealogies Ben Golder; 5. Legal theory among the ruins Samuel Moyn; 6. Institutional conditions of contemporary legal thought Paulo Barrozo; 7. 'Legal theory', strategies of learned production, and the relatively weak autonomy of the subfield of learned law Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth; 8. Law and language as information systems: perish the thought! Marianne Constable; 9. Our geological contemporary Alain Pottage; Part II. Images of the Legal Contemporary?: 10. International law as 'global governance' Martti Koskenniemi; 11. Recasting labor standards for the contemporary: international versus transnational frameworks at the ILO Leila Kawar; 12. An effective and affective history of colonial law Judith Surkis; 13. A cultural reluctance to rights Louis Assier-Andrieu; 14. The scene of nature Denise Ferreira da Silva; 15. Registering interests: modern methods of valuing labor, land and life Brenna Bhandar; 16. Market anti-naturalisms Andrew Lang; 17. Neoliberalism and the new international economic order: a history of 'contemporary legal thought' Umut Özsu; 18. … and law? John Henry Schlegel; Part III: Structures of the Legal Contemporary: 19. A social psychological interpretation of the hermeneutic of suspicion in contemporary American legal thought Duncan Kennedy; 20. Office and persona of the critical jurist: peripheral legal thought (Australia) Shaun McVeigh; 21. Zombie jurisprudence Omri Ben-Zvi; 22. The knowledge bubble: a diagnostic for expertopia Pierre Schlag; 23. ADR and some thoughts on 'the social' in contemporary legal thought Amy J. Cohen; 24. Complexity and reconstruction as contemporary legal thought: law-conflict interactions and judicial work Michal Alberstein; 25. Democratic experimentalism Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon; 26. Legal amateurism Annelise Riles; 27. After the end of legal thought Justin Desautels-Stein; Afterword; Contemporary legal thought as … Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins.