It seems somewhat churlish at the end of so much discussion, at the terminus of the circulation o... more It seems somewhat churlish at the end of so much discussion, at the terminus of the circulation of so extensive a commentary and critical appraisal of a single text, to offer further doubts, to intimate certain additional, and worse, extraneous criticisms of Jitirgen's contribution to ...
Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, 2005
In the course of a discussion of the ethics of friendship, Jacques Derrida makes a curious and se... more In the course of a discussion of the ethics of friendship, Jacques Derrida makes a curious and seemingly offhand remark: 'One has no friendship for law.' 1 His immediate point is that the classical teneritas amicitiae or fondness of friendship has no place in law. Friendship is a relation to a person, law administers things. Within the Western tradition, and specifically within the scholastic and highly legalistic doctrine of friendship that we inherit from a Latinate past, it is secrecy and subjectivity that make the bond of friendship and it is precisely that subjective bond that must be given up by all who enter the portals of law. In a paradoxical sense, it has long been the case and continues to be the case that the ideal-type of the lawyer is that of someone estranged from both friendship and personhood. The lawyer acts for persons, persons speak through or are represented by lawyers, but the fate of the advocate or orator, of Nietzsche's epigone, the filing clerk, the jurist, is that they are friendless, that at root they are alone. The solitude of the lawyer, their recusal from amity or intimacy in public life, has been a productive seam within the legal tradition. Curiously it is lawyers who have most often written about friendship and it is law that has formed the context of almost all of the treatises on friendship. Aristotle, while not a lawyer, famously states that good legislators pay more attention to friendship than to justice. 2 Cicero, a lawyer, wrote his treatise on friendship in the form of a dialogue with his law teacher, Publius Mucius Scaevola. 3 Tacitus discusses friendship in the context of law, and defines the successful legal life as that of the orator who has never failed his friends. 4 To continue into the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, author of a famous essay on friendship was 23
The archive is in significant part the melancholic record of death. It harbours coffins, tombs an... more The archive is in significant part the melancholic record of death. It harbours coffins, tombs and tomes. An image, first, of an untimely death. Part of a personal archive, the record of time long since spent. Shards of a history that did not happen. A shadow. A shade. Dr Ewan Maclean, a figure of encyclopedic learning and aesthetic inclinations, did his doctorate on art forgery. I knew him, and I had admired his knowledge and his thesis while studying in Edinburgh. He was short, bald, bibliophilic, brilliant but boring and in consequence unmemorable and prone to alcohol and an academic diffidence that led to his joining the civil service and moving to London at around the same time that I was appointed to Birkbeck to set up the law department. Ewan was working on miscarriages of justice and so I asked him to tutor for the new school. He did so rather unsuccessfully for a year or two, only really at ease, so I felt, when drinking with students after class. He never applied for a per...
The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous ti... more The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous title to an excavation of the ontology of the minor. Associated theologically with the abrogation of all law, the minor is the child, play, the modal chord that challenges, subverts and displaces the certainty of the major key and black letter law. A minor jurisprudence is argued here to be a lifestyle that challenges the extant legal form of office, the establishment as doctrine, the stasis and complacency of the institution. This journal article is available in Law Text Culture: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol21/iss1/3 30 0000Law Text Culture Vol 21 2017 How Strange the Change
The covert and uncertain visibility of affect defines the law of amity, the shadow realm of _lex ... more The covert and uncertain visibility of affect defines the law of amity, the shadow realm of _lex amicitiae_, as elaborated most often by humanistic jurists in the course of mustering and defending their various doctrinal and disciplinary schools, orthodoxy and heresy, liturgy and anathema, glory and abomination in the literary genres and the classrooms of knowledge. How does our intellectual kinship, tribal membership, and theoretical intimacy or in Baudelaire’s terms, “_l’idealfraternitaire,_” the archipelago of group attraction and affinity, impact upon and discreetly inform our work? More specifically, how does this unspoken _amicitia_ define our relations to, interactions with, and scholarly exchanges between the variable groups and mobile identities that tenuously form the momentary collocation of the common law tradition in the U.S.A. which I will here both explicate and castigate, and first off call by its proper name, _mos americanus_.
The jurisliterary profession is the curious enterprise of writing, as a jurist, about law. Many s... more The jurisliterary profession is the curious enterprise of writing, as a jurist, about law. Many seek to escape into literature, philosophy, critique, psychoanalysis, the couch, but then, in the main, they have abandoned law. Those that persist, who remain jurists, have the propensity to transgress the boundaries of the juridical, the strictures of abstraction and disembodiment, so as to generate accounts of legal sensibility, so as to manifest the polyglottal and visceral potential of transforming the juridical bubble into that most ethical of realms, the poetics of desire. Jurisliterary transgression, at its strongest, returns the materiality of imagination to the sensorium of legality.
... Hollywood, Figures and Film,Vincent Dozol: Hollywood: Previsualization and post 9-11 style?, ... more ... Hollywood, Figures and Film,Vincent Dozol: Hollywood: Previsualization and post 9-11 style?, Constance Ortuzar: The 9-11: The Chilean Coup and its Visual Memory, ChristianDelage:Visualizing 9-11, Portfolio: Peter Goodrich and Linda Mills, Edward Hillel, Richard Sherwin. ...
Conclusion: Does Love Have Standing? The modern history of the laws of love has been that of a so... more Conclusion: Does Love Have Standing? The modern history of the laws of love has been that of a sorry misplacement. The laws have been discounted, marginalized, mislaid, confined to peripheral spaces. They have formed at most a very minor jurisdiction. Their paradoxical competence has been that of a forgotten erudition, their momentary and generally esoteric manifestations have been in the curious form of very obscure, highly serious and worthily scholarly recollections of a paradoxically dour gay science and an extremely technical art of speaking justly in civil matters. Where we encounter the laws of love today, it is as an anthropological relic or as an amusing curiosity. As if love were simply a curiosity, a marginal aspect of social life. As if the hidden intimacies of the public sphere were no more than bizarre distractions from what is really taking place, the main event, politics or institutional action as usual. And as if working life were free of love and hate, libido and lust. No fun in that, neither erotics nor pleasure. So take another example. Yet one more marginal text. A genuinely minor contribution. A little symptom in the form of a lawyer's spoof of the laws of love that appeared toward the end of the last century, just a few years back, in the halcyon days of late 1994. First, however, a little context. This was the era of political correctness on U.S. campuses. Sexual orientations proliferated, and the fin de siècle excesses of the sex wars hit both the legislatures and the courts with novel claims, both rights and wrongs that needed new determinations. Legislatures throughout the common law world were busy criminalizing sex and penalizing erotic enjoyment. Even as staid a figure as Lord Ordinary of Appeal, Justice Ward acknowledged the incoming tide. Asked to decide whether a same sex couple could be "spouses" for the purposes of the Rent Act he bravely dissented and concluded that they could: a gay couple could have "family qualities." To this he adds: "I have not reached this decision lightly.
One has t o be audacious in one's reading, so that it becomes an intense deciphering. We need not... more One has t o be audacious in one's reading, so that it becomes an intense deciphering. We need not be afraid of wandering, though one should read in terms of a quest. There always has beenfemininity from time immemorial but it has been repressed. I t has never been unnamed, only suppressed. But it constantly reappears everywhere.. .. {Law) is like history. It is organized so as t o repress and hide its own origin which always deals with some kind offemininity.' There is an immediate and striking sense in which common law is tied to what are classically projected as feminine principles. It is a tradition which has prided itself upon the particular character of its justice, the subjectivitythe discretionof its judges, and the malleable and essentially cyclical quality of its rules. As an unwritten system of law, the tradition which John Selden explicitly termed "Our Lady the Common Lawv2 is a law without writing and so a law without law.3 For the Western legal tradition, from the Ten Commandments to the Twelve Tables, from the Corpus iuris to the Code civile, law was writing: ratio scripta meant law, written reason was a synonym for legality. The common law, however, resisted the imperative to codify, and while the law was gradually, indeterminately, and haphazardly reported and collected into books, its sources and reason were neither conceived as the logic of the written nor represented as universal law. Rather than relying upon tablets, tables, or other inscriptions or reminders, the common law conceived its sources as oral or oracular and found its origins in nature or in the immemorial and indefinite web of practice continued since time out of mind. The source of the law was not writing, nor was it conceived as some form of exterior inscription but rather as an internal principle of unwritten recollection, a faith or heart or body that lived the law. In contemporary terms it could be said that the very concept of the unwritten tradition of customary law was embeddedboth in theory and in practicein relationships rather
the material is concerned, specitkally the righls of translarion, reprinting, reuse of illustrati... more the material is concerned, specitkally the righls of translarion, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasiliig, reproducuon on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and relrieval, electronic adaptation, compvter software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection wilh reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on 11 compv\er system, for exclusive 11se by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this pllbticalion or pans lhereof is permitted only lll'Kler the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher's location, in its currern version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be ob\ained lhrOl&gh RigbtsLiok at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution imder the respective Copyright Law. The sse of general descrip\ive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific s\!Kement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and reglllalions an'1 therefore free for general use. While the advice and informalion io this book ace believed to be true and accurate at the date of publkalion, neither the a111hors oor the editors nor the pubiisber can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions I.ha{ may be made. The pl&blisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect 10 the ona\erial contained herein.
Amongst the last generation of continental philosophers Derrida stands out as the most jurisprude... more Amongst the last generation of continental philosophers Derrida stands out as the most jurisprudential of thinkers. His early work on literary texts was already focused on laws of genre, on being before the law, and upon the legality of speech acts. His later work on the ...
A plethora of readings. Indeed a brace of Readers, two Lecturers-the word a base Latinity for Rea... more A plethora of readings. Indeed a brace of Readers, two Lecturers-the word a base Latinity for Reader-and a name which is but a double 'r' away from Booke. The sum of which is a thoroughly literary endeavour, a bookish event, a series of textual exhalations. The first question to be asked, untoward though it may be, is what have the Readers been reading? The rest will follow from the answer to that question. The initial answer is that the configuration 'Law and Literature' allows for a reading of literary texts. Aside from the innominate marginal scribble that Goodrich reads, the gathering of texts analysed, interpreted, and brought to law are entirely literary. There is a little hedonism, a touch of reverie, as well as an expansive gesture toward accessibility, in the selection of books being read. Melanie Williams turns to W.H. Auden and questions the trauma that motivates specific, nominate, theories of law. Her concern is with the 'unconscious trends', the patterns and repetitions that lead from 'September 1, 1939', a poem which Auden wrote in New York at the outbreak of World War II, and September 11, 2001. If there is a motif it is a line that Auden changed from 'We must love one another or die' to 'We must love one another and die'. Melanie Williams conjures a trauma that is perceived as external to law but which is in fact internal to legal thought. The poet's concerns with crisis, the failure of reason, with love and war can be traced in displaced form in the history of jurisprudence. She offers a reading that is against the grain, a subtle and untoward interpretation that Adam Gearey picks up in analysing the words of Desmond Tutu and of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He also plays upon a contrary or untoward grain, a legal
BIO: * Marco da Cola, the Italian protagonist of Ian Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost (1... more BIO: * Marco da Cola, the Italian protagonist of Ian Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), remarks that the English are unique for their capacity to lose their friends. Italians treat the friend, once fashioned, as family and hence as an inseparable incidence of existence, ...
It seems somewhat churlish at the end of so much discussion, at the terminus of the circulation o... more It seems somewhat churlish at the end of so much discussion, at the terminus of the circulation of so extensive a commentary and critical appraisal of a single text, to offer further doubts, to intimate certain additional, and worse, extraneous criticisms of Jitirgen's contribution to ...
Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, 2005
In the course of a discussion of the ethics of friendship, Jacques Derrida makes a curious and se... more In the course of a discussion of the ethics of friendship, Jacques Derrida makes a curious and seemingly offhand remark: 'One has no friendship for law.' 1 His immediate point is that the classical teneritas amicitiae or fondness of friendship has no place in law. Friendship is a relation to a person, law administers things. Within the Western tradition, and specifically within the scholastic and highly legalistic doctrine of friendship that we inherit from a Latinate past, it is secrecy and subjectivity that make the bond of friendship and it is precisely that subjective bond that must be given up by all who enter the portals of law. In a paradoxical sense, it has long been the case and continues to be the case that the ideal-type of the lawyer is that of someone estranged from both friendship and personhood. The lawyer acts for persons, persons speak through or are represented by lawyers, but the fate of the advocate or orator, of Nietzsche's epigone, the filing clerk, the jurist, is that they are friendless, that at root they are alone. The solitude of the lawyer, their recusal from amity or intimacy in public life, has been a productive seam within the legal tradition. Curiously it is lawyers who have most often written about friendship and it is law that has formed the context of almost all of the treatises on friendship. Aristotle, while not a lawyer, famously states that good legislators pay more attention to friendship than to justice. 2 Cicero, a lawyer, wrote his treatise on friendship in the form of a dialogue with his law teacher, Publius Mucius Scaevola. 3 Tacitus discusses friendship in the context of law, and defines the successful legal life as that of the orator who has never failed his friends. 4 To continue into the Renaissance, Francis Bacon, author of a famous essay on friendship was 23
The archive is in significant part the melancholic record of death. It harbours coffins, tombs an... more The archive is in significant part the melancholic record of death. It harbours coffins, tombs and tomes. An image, first, of an untimely death. Part of a personal archive, the record of time long since spent. Shards of a history that did not happen. A shadow. A shade. Dr Ewan Maclean, a figure of encyclopedic learning and aesthetic inclinations, did his doctorate on art forgery. I knew him, and I had admired his knowledge and his thesis while studying in Edinburgh. He was short, bald, bibliophilic, brilliant but boring and in consequence unmemorable and prone to alcohol and an academic diffidence that led to his joining the civil service and moving to London at around the same time that I was appointed to Birkbeck to set up the law department. Ewan was working on miscarriages of justice and so I asked him to tutor for the new school. He did so rather unsuccessfully for a year or two, only really at ease, so I felt, when drinking with students after class. He never applied for a per...
The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous ti... more The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous title to an excavation of the ontology of the minor. Associated theologically with the abrogation of all law, the minor is the child, play, the modal chord that challenges, subverts and displaces the certainty of the major key and black letter law. A minor jurisprudence is argued here to be a lifestyle that challenges the extant legal form of office, the establishment as doctrine, the stasis and complacency of the institution. This journal article is available in Law Text Culture: http://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol21/iss1/3 30 0000Law Text Culture Vol 21 2017 How Strange the Change
The covert and uncertain visibility of affect defines the law of amity, the shadow realm of _lex ... more The covert and uncertain visibility of affect defines the law of amity, the shadow realm of _lex amicitiae_, as elaborated most often by humanistic jurists in the course of mustering and defending their various doctrinal and disciplinary schools, orthodoxy and heresy, liturgy and anathema, glory and abomination in the literary genres and the classrooms of knowledge. How does our intellectual kinship, tribal membership, and theoretical intimacy or in Baudelaire’s terms, “_l’idealfraternitaire,_” the archipelago of group attraction and affinity, impact upon and discreetly inform our work? More specifically, how does this unspoken _amicitia_ define our relations to, interactions with, and scholarly exchanges between the variable groups and mobile identities that tenuously form the momentary collocation of the common law tradition in the U.S.A. which I will here both explicate and castigate, and first off call by its proper name, _mos americanus_.
The jurisliterary profession is the curious enterprise of writing, as a jurist, about law. Many s... more The jurisliterary profession is the curious enterprise of writing, as a jurist, about law. Many seek to escape into literature, philosophy, critique, psychoanalysis, the couch, but then, in the main, they have abandoned law. Those that persist, who remain jurists, have the propensity to transgress the boundaries of the juridical, the strictures of abstraction and disembodiment, so as to generate accounts of legal sensibility, so as to manifest the polyglottal and visceral potential of transforming the juridical bubble into that most ethical of realms, the poetics of desire. Jurisliterary transgression, at its strongest, returns the materiality of imagination to the sensorium of legality.
... Hollywood, Figures and Film,Vincent Dozol: Hollywood: Previsualization and post 9-11 style?, ... more ... Hollywood, Figures and Film,Vincent Dozol: Hollywood: Previsualization and post 9-11 style?, Constance Ortuzar: The 9-11: The Chilean Coup and its Visual Memory, ChristianDelage:Visualizing 9-11, Portfolio: Peter Goodrich and Linda Mills, Edward Hillel, Richard Sherwin. ...
Conclusion: Does Love Have Standing? The modern history of the laws of love has been that of a so... more Conclusion: Does Love Have Standing? The modern history of the laws of love has been that of a sorry misplacement. The laws have been discounted, marginalized, mislaid, confined to peripheral spaces. They have formed at most a very minor jurisdiction. Their paradoxical competence has been that of a forgotten erudition, their momentary and generally esoteric manifestations have been in the curious form of very obscure, highly serious and worthily scholarly recollections of a paradoxically dour gay science and an extremely technical art of speaking justly in civil matters. Where we encounter the laws of love today, it is as an anthropological relic or as an amusing curiosity. As if love were simply a curiosity, a marginal aspect of social life. As if the hidden intimacies of the public sphere were no more than bizarre distractions from what is really taking place, the main event, politics or institutional action as usual. And as if working life were free of love and hate, libido and lust. No fun in that, neither erotics nor pleasure. So take another example. Yet one more marginal text. A genuinely minor contribution. A little symptom in the form of a lawyer's spoof of the laws of love that appeared toward the end of the last century, just a few years back, in the halcyon days of late 1994. First, however, a little context. This was the era of political correctness on U.S. campuses. Sexual orientations proliferated, and the fin de siècle excesses of the sex wars hit both the legislatures and the courts with novel claims, both rights and wrongs that needed new determinations. Legislatures throughout the common law world were busy criminalizing sex and penalizing erotic enjoyment. Even as staid a figure as Lord Ordinary of Appeal, Justice Ward acknowledged the incoming tide. Asked to decide whether a same sex couple could be "spouses" for the purposes of the Rent Act he bravely dissented and concluded that they could: a gay couple could have "family qualities." To this he adds: "I have not reached this decision lightly.
One has t o be audacious in one's reading, so that it becomes an intense deciphering. We need not... more One has t o be audacious in one's reading, so that it becomes an intense deciphering. We need not be afraid of wandering, though one should read in terms of a quest. There always has beenfemininity from time immemorial but it has been repressed. I t has never been unnamed, only suppressed. But it constantly reappears everywhere.. .. {Law) is like history. It is organized so as t o repress and hide its own origin which always deals with some kind offemininity.' There is an immediate and striking sense in which common law is tied to what are classically projected as feminine principles. It is a tradition which has prided itself upon the particular character of its justice, the subjectivitythe discretionof its judges, and the malleable and essentially cyclical quality of its rules. As an unwritten system of law, the tradition which John Selden explicitly termed "Our Lady the Common Lawv2 is a law without writing and so a law without law.3 For the Western legal tradition, from the Ten Commandments to the Twelve Tables, from the Corpus iuris to the Code civile, law was writing: ratio scripta meant law, written reason was a synonym for legality. The common law, however, resisted the imperative to codify, and while the law was gradually, indeterminately, and haphazardly reported and collected into books, its sources and reason were neither conceived as the logic of the written nor represented as universal law. Rather than relying upon tablets, tables, or other inscriptions or reminders, the common law conceived its sources as oral or oracular and found its origins in nature or in the immemorial and indefinite web of practice continued since time out of mind. The source of the law was not writing, nor was it conceived as some form of exterior inscription but rather as an internal principle of unwritten recollection, a faith or heart or body that lived the law. In contemporary terms it could be said that the very concept of the unwritten tradition of customary law was embeddedboth in theory and in practicein relationships rather
the material is concerned, specitkally the righls of translarion, reprinting, reuse of illustrati... more the material is concerned, specitkally the righls of translarion, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasiliig, reproducuon on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and relrieval, electronic adaptation, compvter software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Exempted from this legal reservation are brief excerpts in connection wilh reviews or scholarly analysis or material supplied specifically for the purpose of being entered and executed on 11 compv\er system, for exclusive 11se by the purchaser of the work. Duplication of this pllbticalion or pans lhereof is permitted only lll'Kler the provisions of the Copyright Law of the Publisher's location, in its currern version, and permission for use must always be obtained from Springer. Permissions for use may be ob\ained lhrOl&gh RigbtsLiok at the Copyright Clearance Center. Violations are liable to prosecution imder the respective Copyright Law. The sse of general descrip\ive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific s\!Kement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and reglllalions an'1 therefore free for general use. While the advice and informalion io this book ace believed to be true and accurate at the date of publkalion, neither the a111hors oor the editors nor the pubiisber can accept any legal responsibility for any errors or omissions I.ha{ may be made. The pl&blisher makes no warranty, express or implied, with respect 10 the ona\erial contained herein.
Amongst the last generation of continental philosophers Derrida stands out as the most jurisprude... more Amongst the last generation of continental philosophers Derrida stands out as the most jurisprudential of thinkers. His early work on literary texts was already focused on laws of genre, on being before the law, and upon the legality of speech acts. His later work on the ...
A plethora of readings. Indeed a brace of Readers, two Lecturers-the word a base Latinity for Rea... more A plethora of readings. Indeed a brace of Readers, two Lecturers-the word a base Latinity for Reader-and a name which is but a double 'r' away from Booke. The sum of which is a thoroughly literary endeavour, a bookish event, a series of textual exhalations. The first question to be asked, untoward though it may be, is what have the Readers been reading? The rest will follow from the answer to that question. The initial answer is that the configuration 'Law and Literature' allows for a reading of literary texts. Aside from the innominate marginal scribble that Goodrich reads, the gathering of texts analysed, interpreted, and brought to law are entirely literary. There is a little hedonism, a touch of reverie, as well as an expansive gesture toward accessibility, in the selection of books being read. Melanie Williams turns to W.H. Auden and questions the trauma that motivates specific, nominate, theories of law. Her concern is with the 'unconscious trends', the patterns and repetitions that lead from 'September 1, 1939', a poem which Auden wrote in New York at the outbreak of World War II, and September 11, 2001. If there is a motif it is a line that Auden changed from 'We must love one another or die' to 'We must love one another and die'. Melanie Williams conjures a trauma that is perceived as external to law but which is in fact internal to legal thought. The poet's concerns with crisis, the failure of reason, with love and war can be traced in displaced form in the history of jurisprudence. She offers a reading that is against the grain, a subtle and untoward interpretation that Adam Gearey picks up in analysing the words of Desmond Tutu and of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. He also plays upon a contrary or untoward grain, a legal
BIO: * Marco da Cola, the Italian protagonist of Ian Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost (1... more BIO: * Marco da Cola, the Italian protagonist of Ian Pear's An Instance of the Fingerpost (1998), remarks that the English are unique for their capacity to lose their friends. Italians treat the friend, once fashioned, as family and hence as an inseparable incidence of existence, ...
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