William E. Conklin – författare

Hegel's Laws serves as an accessible introduction to Hegel's ideas on the nature of law. In this book, William Conklin examines whether state-centric domestic and international laws are binding upon autonomous individuals. The author also explores why Hegel assumes that this arrangement is more civilized than living in a stateless culture. The book takes the reader through different structures of legal consciousness, from the private law of property, contract, and crimes to intentionality, the family, the role of the state, and international law. Conklin clearly introduces Hegel's vocabulary and contrasts Hegel's issues and arguments with leading contemporary legal philosophers. The book's originality and interdisciplinary focus open up Hegel's legal philosophy, providing a background to forms of legal consciousness for a wide audience. Addressing whether Hegel succeeds in his endeavor to explain why laws are binding, Conklin comments directly on contemporary constitutional and international law and reveals how Hegel's ideas on law stand up in the world today.

Originally published in 1989, in this remarkable conjunction of constitutional theory, jurisprudence, literary theory, constitutional law, and political theory, William Conklin first tells us what a constitution is not: it is not a text, nor a compendium of judicial and legislative decisions interpreting a text, nor a set of doctrines, nor moral/political values, nor customs, nor a priori conceptions. A constitution, he argues, is an image which exists through the legal consciousness of a community.Using a wide range of Canadian judicial decisions as examples, Conklin shows that the classic cases have been those where the boundaries of two conflicting images clashed. In each instance, the subject-matter itself collapses into a search for a coherent image of what a constitution is all about.The dominant image of a constitution in Canadian judicial discourse has been a rationalist one emanating from the Enlightenment understanding of knowledge. Turning to academic writings on Canadian federalism law, Conklin goes on to identify clearly the boundaries of three versions of rationalism, and to show that Canadian scholars have shared with judges the dominant image of rationalism.In the third part of his essay, the author makes a prescriptive claim, namely that a text such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms arguably raises issues which the rationalist image of a constitution precludes as legitimate inquiries. He identifies a further general image of a constitution in Canadian legal discourse, a teleological one which is rooted in the writings and judgments of Ivan Rand. Finally, he uses the contours of the Rand image to work out a further image of constitution, an image that allows lawyers to entertain issues of both theory and social/cultural practice, thereby placing them in a position to alleviate the pain and suffering of those in need.

Originally published in 1989, in this remarkable conjunction of constitutional theory, jurisprudence, literary theory, constitutional law, and political theory, William Conklin first tells us what a constitution is not: it is not a text, nor a compendium of judicial and legislative decisions interpreting a text, nor a set of doctrines, nor moral/political values, nor customs, nor a priori conceptions. A constitution, he argues, is an image which exists through the legal consciousness of a community.Using a wide range of Canadian judicial decisions as examples, Conklin shows that the classic cases have been those where the boundaries of two conflicting images clashed. In each instance, the subject-matter itself collapses into a search for a coherent image of what a constitution is all about.The dominant image of a constitution in Canadian judicial discourse has been a rationalist one emanating from the Enlightenment understanding of knowledge. Turning to academic writings on Canadian federalism law, Conklin goes on to identify clearly the boundaries of three versions of rationalism, and to show that Canadian scholars have shared with judges the dominant image of rationalism.In the third part of his essay, the author makes a prescriptive claim, namely that a text such as the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms arguably raises issues which the rationalist image of a constitution precludes as legitimate inquiries. He identifies a further general image of a constitution in Canadian legal discourse, a teleological one which is rooted in the writings and judgments of Ivan Rand. Finally, he uses the contours of the Rand image to work out a further image of constitution, an image that allows lawyers to entertain issues of both theory and social/cultural practice, thereby placing them in a position to alleviate the pain and suffering of those in need.

Originally published in 1998, The Phenomenology of Modern Legal Discourse recovers the suffering which is concealed as lawyers, judges and other legal officials resignify a harm through the special vocabulary and grammar which constitutes legal language. At the moment of re-signification, an untranslatable gap erupts between the knowers’ special language and the embodied meanings of the non-knower. The Phenomenology claims that the gap can be unconcealed if the knowers of the special language reconsider their assumptions about legal meaning, the body and desire.With a broad grasp of diverse problematics from the legal procedures, legal discourses and legal theory of three jurisdictions to exemplify his claims, the author interweaves arguments which draw from Edmund Husserl’s and Maurice Merleau Ponty’s insights about meaning. The author's effort demonstrates how one may unconceal lived laws through a re-reading of the role of the experiential body in legal signification. The author’s effort to retrieve the embodiment of legal meaning de-stabilizes deep assumptions of contemporary lawyers and legal theorists.