Amherst Series in Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought – serie

It has long been standard practice in legal studies to identify the place of law within the social order. And yet, as The Place of Law suggests, the meaning of the concept of "the place of law" is not self-evident.This book helps us see how the law defines territory and attempts to keep things in place; it shows how law can be, and is, used to create particular kinds of places -- differentiating, for example, individual property from public land. And it looks at place as a metaphor that organizes the way we see the world. This important new book urges us to ask about the usefulness of metaphors of place in the design of legal regulation.

Law and madness? Madness, it seems, exists outside the law and, in principle, society struggles to keep these slippery terms separate. From this perspective, madness appears to be law's foil, the chaos that escapes law's control and simultaneously justifies its existence. Law's Madness explores the gray area between the realms of reason and madness.The distinguished contributors to Law's Madness propose a fascinating interdisciplinary approach to the instability and mutual permeability of law and madness. Their essays examine a variety of discursive forms—from the literary to the historical to the psychoanalytic—in which law is driven more by narrative than by reason. Their studies delineate the ways in which the law takes its definition in part from that which it excludes, suppresses, or excises from itself, illuminating the drive to enforce barriers between non-reason and legality, while simultaneously shedding new light on the constitutive force of the irrational in legal doctrine.Law's Madness suggests that the tense and paradoxical relationship between law and madness is precisely what erects and sustains law. This provocative collection asks what must be forgotten in order to uphold the rule of law.Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College.

Running through the history of jurisprudence and legal theory is a recurring concern about the connections between law and justice and about the ways law is implicated in injustice. In earlier times law and justice were viewed as virtually synonymous. Experience, however, has taught us that, in fact, injustice may be supported by law. Nonetheless, the belief remains that justice is the special concern of law.Commentators from Plato to Derrida have called law to account in the name of justice, asked that law provide a language of justice, and demanded that it promote the attainment of justice. The justice that is usually spoken about in these commentaries is elusive, if not illusory, and disconnected from the embodied practice of law.Furthermore, the very meaning of justice, especially as it relates to law, is in dispute. Justice may refer to distributional issues or it may involve primarily procedural questions, impartiality in judgment or punishment and recompense.The essays collected in Justice and Injustice in Law and Legal Theory seek to remedy this uncertainty about the meaning of justice and its disembodied quality, by embedding inquiry about justice in an examination of law's daily practices, its institutional arrangements, and its engagement with particular issues at particular moments in time. The essays examine the relationship between law and justice and injustice in specific issues and practices and, in doing so, make the question of justice come alive as a concrete political question. They draw on the disciplines of history, law, anthropology, and political science.Contributors to this volume include Nancy Coot, Joshua Coven, Robert Gorton, Frank Michelin, and Michael Tossing.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.

For law and legal theory the end of the twentieth century is a time of contradiction; while the newly emerging politics of Eastern Europe seek to establish a new rule of law, voices in this country proclaim the "death of law." For the former, law provides hope for stability and fairness. For the latter, the fundamental values that provide a grounding for legality seem no longer secure or satisfying. The Fate of Law is a collection of five original essays, each of which discusses the problems and prospects of law in the late twentieth century. The essays pay particular attention to the impact of broad intellectual and political movements, especially feminism and postmodernism, on law and legal theory.The Fate of Law investigates what happens under the critical scrutiny of those movements and in an era of growing skepticism about law's central claim to objectivity, neutrality, and reason. It describes the struggles that ensue and the responses that are made. Each of the essays that comprise this books is written in its own style and voice; each makes it own judgments and assessments.

"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.

"Sarat and Kearns . . . have edited a truly marvelous work on the impact of the law on daily life and vice versa. . . . the essays are all exemplary, thought- provoking works worthy of a long, contemplative read by scholars, lawyers, and judges alike." --Choice"The subject of law in everyday life is timely in theory and in practice. The essays collected here are stimulating for the very different ways in which they reconfigure the meanings of 'the law' as cultural practice, and 'the everyday' as a cultural domain in which the state expresses a range of interests and engagements. Readers looking for an introduction to this topic will come away from the book with a clear sense of the varied voices and modes of inquiry now involved in sociolegal studies, and what distinguishes them. More experienced readers will appreciate the book's meticulous reconsideration of the instrumentalities, agencies, and constructedness of law." --Carol Greenhouse, Indiana UniversityContributors include David Engel, Hendrik Hartog, Thomas R. Kearns, David Kennedy, Catharine MacKinnon, George Marcus, Austin Sarat, and Patricia Williams.Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, and Chair of the Department of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, 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.

The idea of legal rights today enjoys virtually universal appeal, yet all too often the meaning and significance of rights are poorly understood. The purpose of this volume is to clarify the subject of legal rights by drawing on both historical and philosophical legal scholarship to bridge the gap between these two genres--a gap that has divorced abstract and normative treatments of rights from an understanding of their particular social and cultural contexts. Legal Rights: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives shows that the meaning and extent of rights has been dramatically expanded in this century, though along with the widespread and flourishing popularity of rights, voices of criticism have increasingly been raised. The authors take up the question of the foundation of rights and explore the postmodern challenges to efforts to ground rights outside of history and language. Drawing rich historical analysis and careful philosophical inquiry into productive dialogue, this book explores the many facets of rights at the end of the twentieth century. In these essays, potentially abstract debates come alive as they are related to the struggles of real people attempting to cope with, and improve, their living conditions. The significance of legal rights is measured not just in terms of philosophical categories or as a collection of histories, but as they are experienced in the lives of men and women seeking to come to terms with rights in contemporary life. Contributors are Hadley Arkes, William E. Cain, Thomas Haskell, Morton J. Horwitz, Annabel Patterson, Michael J. Perry, Pierre Schlag, and Jeremy Waldron. 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.

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 Steven Shiffrin. 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.

The concept of culture is troublingly vague and, at the same time, hotly contested, and law's relations to culture are as complex, varied and disputed as the concept of culture itself. The concept of the traditional, unified, reified, civilizing idea of culture has come under attack. The growth of cultural studies has played an important role in redefining culture by including popular culture and questions of social stratification, power and social conflict. Law and legal studies are relative latecomers to cultural studies. As scholars have come to see law as not something apart from culture and society, they have begun to explore the connections between law and culture. Focusing on the production, interpretation, consumption and circulation of legal meaning, these scholars suggest that law is inseparable from the interests, goals and understandings that deeply shape or compromise social life. Against this background, Law in the Domains of Culture brings the insights and approaches of cultural studies to law and tries to secure for law a place in cultural analysis. This book provides a sampling of significant theoretical issues in the cultural analysis of law and illustrates some of those issues in provocative examples of the genre. Law in the Domains of Culture is designed to encourage the still tentative efforts to forge a new interdisciplinary synthesis, cultural studies of law.The contributors are Carol Clover, Rosemary Coombe, Marjorie Garber, Thomas R. Kearns, William Miller, Andrew Ross, Austin Sarat, and Martha Woodmansee.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.

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 essays in this book examine law as an active participant in the process through which history is written and memory is constructed. Instead of seeing law as a "victim" of history, the writers treat law as an author of history, not just in the instrumental sense in which law can be said to make a difference in society, but in the ways that law constructs and uses history.Law looks to the past as it speaks to present needs. In the production of judicial opinions--supposedly definitive statements of what the law is--judges reconstruct law's past, tracing out lines of legal precedent that arguably "compel" their decisions. These essays consider how law treats history, how history appears in legal decisions, and how the authority of history is used to authorize legal decisions.Furthermore, law plays a role in the construction of memory. The writers here ask how law remembers and records the past as well as how it helps us to remember our past. Law in the modern era is one of the most important of our society's technologies for preserving memory. In helping to construct our memory in certain ways law participates in the writing of our collective history. It plays a crucial role in knitting together our past, present, and future.The essays in this volume present grounded examinations of particular problems, places, and practices and address the ways in which memory works in and through law, the sites of remembrance that law provides, the battles against forgetting that are fought in and around those sites, and the resultant role law plays in constructing history. The writers also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshalling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process.The contributors are Joan Dayan, Soshana Felman, Dominic La Capra, Reva Siegel, Brook Thomas, and G. Edward White.Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College. He is past President of the Law and Society Association and current President of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture, and the Humanities. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.

Today the language of human rights, if not human rights themselves, is nearly universal. Human Rights brings together essays that attend to both the allure and criticism of human rights. They examine contestation and contingency in today's human rights politics and help us rethink some of the basic concepts of human rights. Questions addressed in Human Rights include: Can national self-determination be reconciled with human rights? Can human rights be advanced without thwarting efforts to develop indigenous legal traditions? How are the forces of modernization associated with globalization transforming our understanding of human dignity and personal autonomy? What does it mean to talk about culture and cultural choice? Is the protection of culture and cultural choice an important value in human rights discourse? How do human rights figure in local political contests and how are those contests, in turn, shaped by the spread of capitalism and market values? What contingencies shape the implementation of human rights in societies without a strong tradition of adherence to the rule of law? What are the conditions under which human rights claims are advanced and under which nations respond to their appeal?Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College. Thomas R. Kearns is William H. Hastie Professor of Philosophy and Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought, Amherst College.

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.

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.

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 as varied as are 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.

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.

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.Yet, strangely, law's role in the definition, identification, prevention, and amelioration of catastrophe has been largely neglected. The relationship between law and other limiting conditions—such as states of emergency—has been the subject of rich and growing literature. By contrast, little has been written about law and catastrophe. In devoting a volume to the subject, the essays' authors sketch the contours of a relatively fresh, yet crucial, terrain of inquiry. Law and Catastrophe begins the work of developing a jurisprudence of catastrophe.

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.

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. Law and the Stranger explores the ways law identifies and responds to strangers within and across borders. It analyzes the ambiguous place strangers occupy in communities not their own and reflects on how dealing with strangers challenges the laws and communities that invite or parry them. As the book reveals, strangers are made through law, rather than born through accidents of geography.

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. This book examines the ways in which the growing internationalization of law affects domestic national law, the relationship between cosmopolitan legal ideas and understandings of national identity, and the intersections of identity and law based on the liberal tradition of jurisprudence and transnational influences. Ultimately, Law without Nations offers sharp analyses of the fraught relationship between the nation and the state—and the legal forms and practices that they require, constitute, and violently contest.

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. This crucial new book considers the problem of law's physical control of persons and the ways in which this control illuminates competing visions of the law: as both a tool of regulation and an instrument of coercion or punishment. It examines various instances of punishment and regulation to illustrate points of overlap and difference between them, and captures the lived experience of the state's enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules. Ultimately, the essays call into question the adequacy of a view of punishment and/or regulation that neglects the perspectives of those who are at the receiving end of these exercises of state power.

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. Law and the Stranger explores the ways law identifies and responds to strangers within and across borders. It analyzes the ambiguous place strangers occupy in communities not their own and reflects on how dealing with strangers challenges the laws and communities that invite or parry them. As the book reveals, strangers are made through law, rather than born through accidents of geography.

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.

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. This book examines the ways in which the growing internationalization of law affects domestic national law, the relationship between cosmopolitan legal ideas and understandings of national identity, and the intersections of identity and law based on the liberal tradition of jurisprudence and transnational influences. Ultimately, Law without Nations offers sharp analyses of the fraught relationship between the nation and the state—and the legal forms and practices that they require, constitute, and violently contest.

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. This crucial new book considers the problem of law's physical control of persons and the ways in which this control illuminates competing visions of the law: as both a tool of regulation and an instrument of coercion or punishment. It examines various instances of punishment and regulation to illustrate points of overlap and difference between them, and captures the lived experience of the state's enterprise of subjecting human conduct to the governance of rules. Ultimately, the essays call into question the adequacy of a view of punishment and/or regulation that neglects the perspectives of those who are at the receiving end of these exercises of state power.

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.The first half of the work examines the role of secrecy in contemporary political and legal practices—including the question of transparency in democratic processes during the Bush Administration, the principle of public justice in England's response to the war on terror, and the evidentiary law of spousal privilege. The second half of the book explores legal, literary, and filmic representations of secrets in law, focusing on how knowledge about particular cases and crimes is often rendered opaque to those attempting to access and decode the information. Those invested in transparency must ultimately cultivate a capacity to read between the lines, decode the illegible, and acknowledge both the virtues and dangers of the unknowable.

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.The first half of the work examines the role of secrecy in contemporary political and legal practices—including the question of transparency in democratic processes during the Bush Administration, the principle of public justice in England's response to the war on terror, and the evidentiary law of spousal privilege. The second half of the book explores legal, literary, and filmic representations of secrets in law, focusing on how knowledge about particular cases and crimes is often rendered opaque to those attempting to access and decode the information. Those invested in transparency must ultimately cultivate a capacity to read between the lines, decode the illegible, and acknowledge both the virtues and dangers of the unknowable.