Peter Goodrich – författare

A judge springs out of his car on the way to court in downtown Chicago and takes photographs of an inflatable rat. A while later he inserts these photographs into a decision involving another insufflated rodent used in a union protest. The increasing use of images in case law and precedent in the common law world provides a novel visual atlas of how lawyers see. Using a corpus of many images drawn from decisions in different common law jurisdictions across the globe, Judicial Uses of Images catalogues, analyzes, and reviews the normative significance and affective force of this new medium of legal expression and judgement. The remediation of law is critically dissected in the terms of the emergent optical criteria and protocols of retinal justice..

From early in his career Jacques Derrida was intrigued by law. Over time, this fascination with law grew more manifest and he published a number of highly influential analyses of ethics, justice, violence and law. This book brings together leading scholars in a variety of disciplines to assess Derrida's importance for and impact upon legal studies.

Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. This book provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and "legaleze" more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sign are examined and assessed. In the second part the contemporary disciplines of linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies are brought to bear upon the task of constructing a theory of legal discourse as a linguistics of legal power.

Law and the Unconscious is the first work of the French legal philosopher Pierre Legendre to appear in English. Trained as a lawyer, a historian and a psychoanalyst, the work of Pierre Legendre has consistently confronted law with the teaching and methods of psychoanalysis. The present collection of essays addresses a fascinating and diverse set of themes including the doctrinal regulation of tears, dance and law, the desire for the absolute, the war of texts, and the power of images.

Returning to the map of the island of utopia, this book provides a contemporary, inventive, addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive, let alone a bold imaginary project, an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come.The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression, the celebrated and unknown, venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars, impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law, film, science, history, philosophy, political science, aesthetics, architecture and the classics become, for a brief and inspiring instance, legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributions aim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse, collage, artworks, short stories, harangues, lists, and other pleas, reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines, this book will appeal especially to theorists, lawyers, scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system.

Returning to the map of the island of utopia, this book provides a contemporary, inventive, addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive, let alone a bold imaginary project, an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come.The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression, the celebrated and unknown, venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars, impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law, film, science, history, philosophy, political science, aesthetics, architecture and the classics become, for a brief and inspiring instance, legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributions aim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse, collage, artworks, short stories, harangues, lists, and other pleas, reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines, this book will appeal especially to theorists, lawyers, scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system.

Law in the Courts of Love traces the literary history and diversity of past legal systems. These 'minor jurisprudences' range from the spiritual laws of the courts of conscience to the code and judgements of love handed down by women's courts in medieval France. Professor Goodrich presents the 15th Century Courts of Love in Paris as one instance of an alternative jurisdiction drawn from the diversities of the legal and literary past. Their textual records are correspondingly mixed in genre, being in the form of poems, narratives, plays, treaties and judicial decisions. More broadly, these studies trace certain boundaries of modern law and make up one of many forms of legal knowledge which escape today's vision of a unitary law. The author believes that the unquesionable faith in a unity law and its distance from person and emotion is precisely what makes impossible the attention to the individual that justice ultimately requires. Law in the Courts of Love shows how the historical diversity of forms and procedures of law can competently form the basis for critical revisions of contemporary legal doctrine and professional practice. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of law and literature, critical legal studies and legal history, or anyone wishing to specialise in feminist legal theory.

This timely and assured book provides a unique guide to critical legal studies which is one of the most exciting developments within contemporary jurisprudence. It is the first book to systematically apply a critical philosophy to the substance of common law. The book develops a coruscating and interdisciplinary overview of the politics and cultural significance of the institutions of the law.

This timely and assured book provides a unique guide to critical legal studies which is one of the most exciting developments within contemporary jurisprudence. It is the first book to systematically apply a critical philosophy to the substance of common law. The book develops a coruscating and interdisciplinary overview of the politics and cultural significance of the institutions of the law.

The Scene of the Mass Crime takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genocide? What do the trials actually show? What form of justice is done, and how does it relate to ordinary courts and proceedings? What lessons can be drawn from this history for the very topical political issue of filming civil and criminal trials? This book takes up the diversity and complexity of these idiosyncratic and, in strict terms, generally extra-legal medial situations. Drawing on a fascinating diversity of public trials and filmic responses, from the Trial of the Gang of Four to the Gacaca local courts of Rwanda to the filmic symbolism of 9-11, from Soviet era show trials to Nazi People's Courts leading international scholars address the theatrical, political, filmic and symbolic importance of show trials in making history, legitimating regimes and, most surprising of all, in attempting to heal trauma through law and through film. These essays will be of considerable interest to those working on international criminal law, transitional justice, genocide studies, and the relationship between law and film.

The Scene of the Mass Crime takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genocide? What do the trials actually show? What form of justice is done, and how does it relate to ordinary courts and proceedings? What lessons can be drawn from this history for the very topical political issue of filming civil and criminal trials? This book takes up the diversity and complexity of these idiosyncratic and, in strict terms, generally extra-legal medial situations. Drawing on a fascinating diversity of public trials and filmic responses, from the Trial of the Gang of Four to the Gacaca local courts of Rwanda to the filmic symbolism of 9-11, from Soviet era show trials to Nazi People's Courts leading international scholars address the theatrical, political, filmic and symbolic importance of show trials in making history, legitimating regimes and, most surprising of all, in attempting to heal trauma through law and through film. These essays will be of considerable interest to those working on international criminal law, transitional justice, genocide studies, and the relationship between law and film.

It was the classical task of legal rhetoric to make law both seen and understood. These conjoint goals came to be separated and opposed in modernity and a degree of blindness ensued. Legal reason was increasingly deemed to be a purely textual enterprise. Against this constraint and in furtherance of an incipient visual turn in legal studies, Genealogies of Legal Vision seeks to revive the classical ars iuris and to this end traces the history of regimes of visual control. Law always relied in significant measure upon the use of visual representations, upon pictures, architecture, costume and statuary to convey authority and sovereign norm. Military, religious, administrative and legal insignia found juridical codification and expression in collections of signs of office, in heraldic codes, in genealogical devices, and then finally in the juridical invention in the mid-sixteenth century of the legal emblem book. Genealogies of Legal Vision traces the complex lineage of the legal emblem and argues that the mens emblematica of the humanist lawyers was the inauguration of a visiocratic regime that continues into the multiple new technologies and novel media of contemporary governance. Bringing together leading experts on the history and art of legal emblems this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity.

It was the classical task of legal rhetoric to make law both seen and understood. These conjoint goals came to be separated and opposed in modernity and a degree of blindness ensued. Legal reason was increasingly deemed to be a purely textual enterprise. Against this constraint and in furtherance of an incipient visual turn in legal studies, Genealogies of Legal Vision seeks to revive the classical ars iuris and to this end traces the history of regimes of visual control. Law always relied in significant measure upon the use of visual representations, upon pictures, architecture, costume and statuary to convey authority and sovereign norm. Military, religious, administrative and legal insignia found juridical codification and expression in collections of signs of office, in heraldic codes, in genealogical devices, and then finally in the juridical invention in the mid-sixteenth century of the legal emblem book. Genealogies of Legal Vision traces the complex lineage of the legal emblem and argues that the mens emblematica of the humanist lawyers was the inauguration of a visiocratic regime that continues into the multiple new technologies and novel media of contemporary governance. Bringing together leading experts on the history and art of legal emblems this collection provides a ground-breaking account of the long relationship between visibility, meaning and normativity.

Law in the Courts of Love traces the literary history and diversity of past legal systems. These 'minor jurisprudences' range from the spiritual laws of the courts of conscience to the code and judgements of love handed down by women's courts in medieval France.Professor Goodrich presents the 15th Century Courts of Love in Paris as one instance of an alternative jurisdiction drawn from the diversities of the legal and literary past. Their textual records are correspondingly mixed in genre, being in the form of poems, narratives, plays, treaties and judicial decisions. More broadly, these studies trace certain boundaries of modern law and make up one of many forms of legal knowledge which escape today's vision of a unitary law. The author believes that the unquesionable faith in a unity law and its distance from person and emotion is precisely what makes impossible the attention to the individual that justice ultimately requires. Law in the Courts of Love shows how the historical diversity of forms and procedures of law can competently form the basis for critical revisions of contemporary legal doctrine and professional practice.This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of law and literature, critical legal studies and legal history, or anyone wishing to specialise in feminist legal theory.

Nietzsche and Legal Theory is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, criminology, cultural studies, and literary studies) demonstrate and enact the sort of creativity that Nietzsche associated with the "free-spirits" to whom he addressed some of his most significant work.

Nietzsche and Legal Theory is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, criminology, cultural studies, and literary studies) demonstrate and enact the sort of creativity that Nietzsche associated with the "free-spirits" to whom he addressed some of his most significant work.

Oedipus Lex offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions—the poets, women, and outsiders—that legal science has left in its wake.Goodrich analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Oedipus Lex offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions—the poets, women, and outsiders—that legal science has left in its wake.Goodrich analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law.This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1995.

Legal scholars have only recently begun to address the radical challenges for law and legal theory that follow from Friedrich Nietzsche's pathbreaking work. This collection brings together articles from leading thinkers who consider how Nietzsche's philosophical and rhetorical interventions illuminate the failures of contemporary legal theory. Part One considers the connections between law, political philosophy and Nietzsche's genealogy. Part Two provides a number of competing interpretations of Nietzsche's relevance for legal hermeneutics. Part Three includes articles that chart a course for legal critique that remains true to Nietzsche's radical character. The work of prominent philosophers, including P. Christopher Smith, is joined with the work of leading legal theorists, including Philippe Nonet and leading rhetoricians, including Marianne Constable, to provide complex and sophisticated overview of the manner in which Nietzsche problematizes law and legal theory.

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. The book brings contemporary critique to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake. Contributors: Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sutter, Katrin Trüstedt, Marco Wan

Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the art of law. Tracking the thread of philosophical influences upon the community of legal interpretation, the essays move from the translation and wake of Derrida to the work of Agamben, from deconstruction to oikononmia. Sharing roots in the philological excavation of the political theology of modern law, contributors assess the failure of secularism and the continuing theological borrowings of juridical interpretation. The book brings contemporary critique to bear upon the interpretative apparatuses of exclusion, the law of spectacular sovereignty, and the bodies that lie in its wake. Contributors: Giovanna Borradori, Marinos Diamantides, Allen Feldman, Stanley Fish, Pierre Legrand, Bernadette Meyler, Michel Rosenfeld, Bernhard Schlink, Jeanne Schroeder, Laurent de Sutter, Katrin Trüstedt, Marco Wan

The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from performance studies, theatre history, aesthetics, dance, film, history, and law provide critical analyses of the sites, dramas and stage directions to be found in the orchestration of the tragedies and comedies acted out in multiple forums of contemporary legality. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from performance studies, theatre history, aesthetics, dance, film, history, and law provide critical analyses of the sites, dramas and stage directions to be found in the orchestration of the tragedies and comedies acted out in multiple forums of contemporary legality. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

This book brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars from across the spectrum of disciplines, generations, and geopolitical divides to revisit Jacques Derrida’s account of law, violence and justice.Deconstruction is variously a philosophy of aporia, a method of patience, a practice of paradoxes, an ontography of uncertainty, a hermeneutics of escalation that sought not only to challenge metaphysical complacencies but also to transgress boundaries, test limits, and above all to provoke, invoke and convoke thought. As a reworking of the philosophical tradition, its impact on law and legal theory became unavoidable in 1989 when Derrida, persuaded by the late Drucilla Cornell, came to address a law school audience on the mystical foundations of law. In a lecture – ‘Force of Law’ – that had global intellectual resonance, he startled the jurists by declaring that deconstruction ‘is’ justice. For some lawyers, it was a landmark thesis, a liberation. For others, it was deemed to be nihilist, a denial of all possibility of meaning, and so denounced as the equivalent of tearing up the constitution, or burning of the flag. Some twenty years after his death, in this book, renowned Derridean scholars revisit this legacy, as it offers a series of re-readings of ‘Force of Law’, and a series of new reflections on Derrida’s account of the violence of legality and the possibility of justice.This book will appeal to philosophers, legal theorists, and others with an interest in deconstruction and Continental theory.

This book brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars from across the spectrum of disciplines, generations, and geopolitical divides to revisit Jacques Derrida’s account of law, violence and justice.Deconstruction is variously a philosophy of aporia, a method of patience, a practice of paradoxes, an ontography of uncertainty, a hermeneutics of escalation that sought not only to challenge metaphysical complacencies but also to transgress boundaries, test limits, and above all to provoke, invoke and convoke thought. As a reworking of the philosophical tradition, its impact on law and legal theory became unavoidable in 1989 when Derrida, persuaded by the late Drucilla Cornell, came to address a law school audience on the mystical foundations of law. In a lecture – ‘Force of Law’ – that had global intellectual resonance, he startled the jurists by declaring that deconstruction ‘is’ justice. For some lawyers, it was a landmark thesis, a liberation. For others, it was deemed to be nihilist, a denial of all possibility of meaning, and so denounced as the equivalent of tearing up the constitution, or burning of the flag. Some twenty years after his death, in this book, renowned Derridean scholars revisit this legacy, as it offers a series of re-readings of ‘Force of Law’, and a series of new reflections on Derrida’s account of the violence of legality and the possibility of justice.This book will appeal to philosophers, legal theorists, and others with an interest in deconstruction and Continental theory.

The genealogy of legal office is pieced together here to rediscover the scope and ambition of a role that has been largely lost to conscious self-reflection. Organized around a concern with the inheritance of juristic traditions, institutions, and forms of life, the contributors to this book take up the question of how a jurist might learn to live, or die, with law. The collection invites readers to reconsider fundamental questions: What responsibilities accompany the jurist’s role? How do different traditions conceptualize the ethical obligations of legal interpretation? What happens when established norms face modern challenges? By reconstructing the genealogy of legal office across diverse traditions, the contributors recover aspects of juridical identity that have faded from contemporary awareness.Law, Ethics, and the Office of the Jurist will appeal to legal scholars, practitioners, and students, as well as those in adjacent fields concerned with professional ethics, institutional history, and the evolving relationship between law and society in our complex global landscape.

The genealogy of legal office is pieced together here to rediscover the scope and ambition of a role that has been largely lost to conscious self-reflection. Organized around a concern with the inheritance of juristic traditions, institutions, and forms of life, the contributors to this book take up the question of how a jurist might learn to live, or die, with law. The collection invites readers to reconsider fundamental questions: What responsibilities accompany the jurist’s role? How do different traditions conceptualize the ethical obligations of legal interpretation? What happens when established norms face modern challenges? By reconstructing the genealogy of legal office across diverse traditions, the contributors recover aspects of juridical identity that have faded from contemporary awareness.Law, Ethics, and the Office of the Jurist will appeal to legal scholars, practitioners, and students, as well as those in adjacent fields concerned with professional ethics, institutional history, and the evolving relationship between law and society in our complex global landscape.

The emblem book was invented by the humanist lawyer Andrea Alciato in 1531. The preponderance of juridical and normative themes, of images of rule and infraction, of obedience and error in the emblem books is critical to their purpose and interest. This book outlines the history of the emblem tradition as a juridical genre, along with the concept of, and training in, obiter depicta, in things seen along the way to judgment. It argues that these books depict norms and abuses in classically derived forms that become the visual standards of governance. Despite the plethora of vivid figures and virtual symbols that define and transmit law, contemporary lawyers are not trained in the critical apprehension of the visible. This book is the first to reconstruct the history of the emblem tradition, evidencing the extent to which a gallery of images of law already exists and structuring how the public realm is displayed, made present and viewed.

The essays collected here under the governing signs, Law, Text, Terror have their origins in a singular and topical desire. Their motive is most immediately that of acknowledging the massive and eccentric contribution of the philologist, psychoanalyst and Romanist jurist Pierre Legendre to the study of legal institutions and juridical practices. He has unceasingly asked the question 'why law?' and in endeavouring to answer that question, in the course of over twenty-five books published during the last forty years, he has traversed a unique and uniquely idiosyncratic body of disciplines and knowledges relevant to the symbolic forms and institutional functions of the Western legal order. These essays reflect that singularity of drive as well as that diversity of scholarly interests by taking up, playing with, varying and developing the themes of text and terror, law and territory, that Legendre either introduced or made peculiarly his own.