The Expressionless: Law, Ethics, and the Imagery of Suffering

The essay discusses law’s inability to address the phenomenon of human suffering and, at the same time, investigates a possible theoretical kinship between Walter Benjamin’s notion of ‘the expressionless’ and Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of suffering as the foundation of an interhuman ethics. The kinship between Levinas and Benjamin is examined with reference to suffering in the visual arts and, more specifically, in Matthias Grünewald’s Isenheim Altarpiece and Francis Bacon’s crucifixion triptychs. The essay argues that in the crucifixion scenes of both Grünewald’s medieval altarpiece and Bacon’s triptychs, suffering is what constitutes ‘the expressionless’. After every detail of the image, every element of attribute, motif, composition and colour have been accurately depicted, a residue still remains, an ethical truth that cannot be appropriated into a meaningful unity but that nevertheless calls for a response. While law must always give suffering a utilitarian value in its attempts to assign responsibility for the injury occurred, the essay argues that the fragmentariness in all true art that Benjamin calls ‘the expressionless’ is akin to Levinas’s understanding of the constitutional uselessness of suffering, its essence as ‘for nothing’.

Necroethics of Terrorism

This essay is an attempt to begin to think through the complex interlacing of Levinasian ethics, violence, terror and war. The question driving this essay is: in the midst of the harrowing debris of body parts that followed the synchronised explosions of bombs in a number of London train carriages and a bus, what can possibly remain of the ethical? This question will be examined in the context of what remains unspeakable in the face of such acts of violence. Framed by the authorising rubric of declarations of law—as ‘that which speaks in the language of legislation and promises certainty in the anxious aftermath of the loss of certainty’, and the attendant concerns with the question of the ‘enemy’ (as clandestine operative of terror and as object of fantasies)—this essay seeks to examine the ‘unspeakable remainder’ of declarations of law, as that which unsettles (legislated) promises of certainty in the anxious aftermath of a terrorist explosion and its ongoing trauma. In the course of this essay, I proceed to think through the contentious relation between violence and ethics in the context of a Levinasian framework, arguing for a Levinas that challenges and unsettles pietistic views of his ethical philosophy. In deploying the neologism necroethics, I attempt to examine anachronic and necrological violence and its relation to the ethical injunction to own responsibility for the dead.     

Sex @ the End of the Twentieth Century: Some Re-marks on a Minor Jurisprudence

This article offers a re-reading of Goodrichs essay, Law in the Courts of Love. My contention here is that the idiom of love that Goodrich provides us with in this essay cannot address the complexity of sexuality and sexual politics that inhabit our contemporary technoscientific culture. In so doing, I will juxtapose his essay with Laven Berlant and Michael Warners essay, Public Sex. This article will be divided into three sections. In the first section, I will evaluate and review Goodrichs genealogical approach to law and the image of justice that arises out of his approach. The second section will be a re-reading of Goodrichs Law in the Courts of Love through feminist and technoscientific discourses. Its aim is to problematise and re-think not only the idiom of feminine justice that Goodrich offers, but also to question the presuppositions upon which his work is based, primary presuppositions surrounding issues of privacy, sexuality and sexuated rights. Finally, in the third section I will conclude by suggesting that the re-figuration of justice necessitates a re-figuration of the relationship that law has with time and space.     

Attempts at drug control in Colombia,Peru and Bolivia

The paper analyzes as part of a broader study the drug-control policy of the cocacocaine producing countries of Colombia, Perú and Bolivia, beginning with a short introduction of the political framework. The legal and political emphasis of this policy lies in the area of control and repression, which therefore is analysed in more detail. One can recognize a (substantial) tendency towards overcriminalisation linked to easier (procedural) possibilities of criminal prosecution and punishment (II). However, this questionable policy, when examined from a civil rights standpoint, proves to be of limited efficacy: given the continuing flow of cocaine to the US and the expanding trade to Europe, the policy can hardly pass a qualitative test considering the quantitative evidence (III). There are basically two alternatives from the viewpoint of the producing countries: the international commercialisation of coca and alternative development; from the viewpoint of the consumer countries the controlled legalisation (IV).This article is based on criminological research about the drug policies of Colombia, Peru and Bolivia, which was accepted at the end of 1992 as a doctoral thesis by the Law Faculty of the University of Munich. It attempts to summarize the substantial results of this research but is compelled, due to its limited scope, to frequently refer to previous publications (Ambos, 1993, 1994).This article was published in an earlier German version in Monatsschrift für Kriminologie und Strafrechtsreform, vol. 76, No. 4/1993, pp. 206–226, in a Spanish version in: Cuadernos de Política Criminal (Madrid) No. 53 (1994) pp. 629–667 and Revista dela Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Politicas, No. 98 (1996), Universidad Central de Venezuela, Caracas, pp. 343–390. — I am indebted to Prof. Daniel Nesereko, University of Botswana for refining the English version and critial comments.     

Post-secular Messianism Against the Law: Judith Butler on Walter Benjamin and ‘Sacred Life’

This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012a) of sacred life from the mystical motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular (2003), where he enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In underscoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘“the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm. I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it.     

Otherwise than Hospitality: A Disputation on the Relation of Ethics to Law and Politics

At a time of unprecedented migration and social displacement, following a century ravaged by war and hegemonic shift, the question of hospitality presents itself with unparalleled urgency. Taking his cue from Immanuel Kant’s cosmopolitics, Jacques Derrida addressed this question by deliberating on the nature of the political obligation to the other person. Invoking the work of Emmanuel Levinas, this demand is first of all ethical, and unconditional. But Derrida was also acutely aware of the residual violence of the hospitable gesture, which always takes place in a scene of power. The resultant aporias at the heart of hospitality provoked debate between the two authors at the 2007 Critical Legal Conference, and this paper seeks to elucidate and elaborate on this encounter. At stake are the matters of the potential political forms of hospitality, whether it should always been striven for and, ultimately, how one can conceptually reconcile its ethics with its violence.

Precedent Externality, Network Effect, and the Possible Inefficiency of the Evolution of Laws

Using the traditional scenario of tort conflict as an example, I argue that the marginal precautionary costs of injurers and victims are not constant, as was assumed by most previous researchers. The precedent of a liability rule has some natural externality on the precaution technology, and hence marginal cost, faced by future agents involved in torts. The adoption of legal rules therefore has a network effect, meaning that the present prevalent adoption of one rule increases the probability of its future adoption. Treating the dynamic evolution of legal rules as a random process, we are able to apply an established result in the literature of network economies to conclude the path-dependence, non-predictability, and potential inefficiency concerning the final legal rule to which the dynamics converge.     

Justice and Public Opinion

One of the key questions of justice has become the subject of a discussion that has developed in Izvestia. It can be said that its kernel is the matter of the independence of the judiciary. It is this question that underlies the article by Korenevskii and Sukhodolets, "A Cause of Errors" [Otchego byvaiut oshibki] (Izvestia, No. 61), against which Galkin wrote in his article "The Court and Public Passions" [Sud i obshchestvennye] (Izvestia, No. 91).     

A Collaboration,Not a Duel

In a number of articles published in LG, advocates take on the appearance, in readers' eyes, of lone fighters for truth, law, and justice in the courts. There is no other party on whom a defendant can depend for defense of his legal rights. The picture that emerges is that of the defense counsel as an "adversary" in the case, conducting a struggle over the defendant with another "adversary," the procurator, the state prosecutor. In such a situation, the latter naturally seeks to incriminate, to bring about punishment of the defendant. And for him this is, after all, easy, for behind him is the entire powerful system of the procuracy with all its organizational and technical resources!     

[Disability] Justice Dictated by the Surfeit of Love: Simone Weil in Nigeria

How is Nigeria’s failure to fulfil its obligations as a signatory of the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities to be appreciated or even resolved? Answers to this are sought through a seminal criticism of human rights, namely, Simone Weil’s 1942 essay Human Personality. Weil questioned the ability of human rights concepts to cause the powerful to develop the emotional dispositions of empathy for those who suffer. Weil’s insights provide a convincing explanation that the indifference of Nigerian authorities towards the Convention may be accounted for by the weakness of human rights discourse to foster human capacity for empathy and care for those who suffer. Weil’s criticisms will serve as a point of departure for a particular way to circumvent this inadequacy of human rights discourse to achieve disability justice in Nigeria through other means. I argue that Weil, through her concept of attention, grappled with and offers a consciousness of suffering and vulnerability that is not only uncommon to existing juridical human rights approaches, but is achievable through the active participation in the very forms of suffering and vulnerability in which amelioration is sought. To provide empirical content to this argument, I turn to a short-lived initiative of the Nigerian disability movement, which if ethico-politically refined and widely applied, can supply an action-theoretical grounding for and be combined with Weil’s work to elevate agitations for disability justice above human rights to the realm of human obligations.     

The Evolving Structure of the Environmental Justice Movement in the United States: New Models for Democratic Decision-Making

Over the last two decades in the United States, mainstream environmental organizations have reduced, rather than increased, democratic participation by citizens in environmental problem-solving. The environmental justice movement, on the other hand, has served to enlarge the constituency of the environmental movement by incorporating poorer communities and oppressed people of color into environmental decision making process; build community capacity by developing campaigns and projects that address the common links between various social and environmental problems; and facilitate community empowerment by emphasizing grassroots organizing over advocacy. This paper outlines the different components in the environmental justice movement. It is our contention that if researchers and policymakers continue to conceive of the ecological crisis as a collection of unrelated problems, then it is possible that some combination of regulations, incentives, and technical innovations can keep pollution and resource destruction at tolerable levels for more affluent socioeconomic populations. However, poor working class communities and people of color which lack the political–economic resources to defend themselves will continue to suffer the worst abuses. However, if the interdependency of issues is emphasized as advocated by the environmental justice movement, then a transformative environmental politics can be invented.     

Selective incapacitation and the Philadelphia cohort data

The University of Pennsylvania study of delinquency in a Philadelphia birth cohort has been described byNewsweek as perhaps the most influential piece of criminal justice research in the last decade (March 23, 1981). Many have construed the findings as showing that, if imprisonment were focused on the minority of offenders with especially bad prognoses, the rate of crime could be reduced substantially. But others have taken the opposite view that the cohort data, far from endorsing such a selective incapacitation strategy, might actually provide strong evidence that such an approach is futile. Through some further analyses of the Philadelphia data, we attempt to clarify their policy implications.     

Social Justice and Communication: Mill, Marx, and Habermas

This article concerns how one may theorize a social justice of communication. The article argues that the theory of democracy cannot neglect an analysis of communication and that, indeed, a social justice of communication can be identified in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas’s “deliberative” theory of democracy. The socio-political analyses of communication in John Stuart Mill and Karl Marx are examined as precursors to Habermas’s position because they are useful for setting off the unique synthesis of the liberal and critical traditions that Habermas develops. Such a social justice of communication shows how the communicative mediation of the public sphere can ameliorate the tension between individual autonomy and the solidarity of group membership by communicatively empowering individuals under conditions of mutual respect and equal dignity.

Crime,Justice, and the Under‐Laborer: On the Criminology of the Shadow and the Search for Disciplinary Identity and Legitimacy

This article proposes an alternative vision for what criminal justice can represent such that its interests in becoming a full‐fledged academic discipline are advanced. Linked to philosophical inquiry (the under‐laborer), emphasis is placed on explicating how insights derived from ontology, epistemology, aesthetics, and ethics underscore the field. Coupled with this more probing excursion is psychoanalytic reflexivity (the criminology of the shadow). The manner in which the philosophical lens informs criminal justice is delineated, and the logic of this shadow criminology is described. As dimensions of an inclusive organizing scheme, their potential for fostering integration in crime and justice studies consistent with the goals of disciplinary identity and legitimacy is explored. The implications of the proposed model—especially for charting a new direction in theory, research, policy, and pedagogy—are also highlighted.     

Kenya: succession,customary law

This article seeks to explore the idea that a health care professional who becomes aware that a patient has a genetic linked disorder should in some circumstances owe a duty to inform blood relatives of that fact, and that failure to so inform should be redressed through the law of negligence. This is a contention which has appeared in medical literature ¹ 1 Lucassen, A. (2007), Should families own genetic information? Yes, BMJ, 335(July), p. 22. and been the subject of litigation in American jurisprudence. ² 2 Pate v Threlkel (1995) 661 S0 2d (SC Florida); Safer v Puck (1996) 677 2d 1188 (SC, NJ). Given that medical researchers have identified the genetic causes of many human diseases through more sophisticated methods of DNA sequencing, and have confirmed the hereditary nature of many of these conditions, the disclosure of screening results is a serious and contentious issue. This is particularly so given the increasing importance of preventative medicine as a means of dealing with disease. ³ 3 See Seigler, M. (1982) Confidentiality in medicine – a decrepit concept, N‐Engl J Med, 307, p. 1518, where he refers to medicine expanding ‘from a narrow, disease‐based model to a model that encompasses psychological, social and economic problems’. Also note the increasing emphasis now given to the prevention of diabetes and obesity through lifestyle education. The article suggests, by reference to ethical discourse, and particularly Levinas' theory on responsibility, ⁴ 4 See Levinas, E. (1961) Totality and Infinity, trans. A. Lingus 1969 (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press); Levinas, E. (1974) Otherwise Than Being, or Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingus 1981 (The Hague: Martinus Mijhoff). that health professionals do owe a duty of care to a patient's relatives, but that this duty may be discharged in ways which do not necessarily involve the disclosure of the information to those parties, and that it is only in certain, specified circumstances that a duty to disclose the information exists.     

Stray bullets and “mushrooms”: Random shootings of bystanders in four cities, 1977–1988

Bystanders killed by bullets not specifically intended for them have long been a very small part of the homicide problem. But the frequency of press accounts of such killings and woundings has apparently increased nationally in recent years. To test this impression, we compiled all shootings of bystanders hit at random and reported in the published indexes of theNew York Times, theLos Angeles Times, and theWashington Post for 1977–1988, as well as a key word computer search of stories in theBoston Globe. We found a rapid increase in both bystander woundings and killings since 1985 in all four cities. The base rate was quite low, and total bystander deaths appear to comprise less than 1% of all homicides in these cities. Nonetheless, the numbers were large enough to show that most bystanders reported shot in New York and Los Angeles are victims of random shootings into crowds, rather than single stray bullets striking a lone individual mushroom. The reverse was true in Boston and Washington, with the effect of much lower rates of bystanders reported shot in those cities.     

Democracy, Sea Power and Institutional Change: An Economic Analysis of the Athenian Naval Law

The present essay attempts to test the validity of the theory of institutional change based on the concept of property rights, in the remote historical setting of Classical Athens. The Naval Law introduced by Themistocles in 483-2 BC, established the institution of trierarchy to produce warships to face the Persian invaders. This reform led to the first attempt to define the costs and benefits of public goods in the field of national defense. Thus, institutional change in Ancient Athens, through an efficient arrangement of property rights and duties, had long-term consequences on economic performance, creating a new growth path and ensuring economic prosperity and social justice for more than 150 years.     

Movie review essay

While Paul McCold’s intent to clarify the compatibility of restorative justice and community justice conceptual frameworks is laudable, his effort provides as much confusion as clarity (McCold, 2004 McCold, P. (2004). Paradigm muddle: The threat to restorative justice posed by its merger with community justice. Contemporary Justice Review, 7: 13–35. [Taylor &; Francis Online] , [Google Scholar], this issue). This piece identifies some of the conflicts inherent in the roots of the development and growth of restorative justice. It also raises concerns regarding how restorative justice theoreticians and practitioners consider community, the role of strangers, empowerment, prevention, and punishment within restorative frameworks. The authors of this piece conclude that, while it remains important to safeguard the underlying principles of restorative justice, it is also necessary to remain open to new possibilities and to new ideas.     

Recidivism in Stalking and Obsessional Harassment

Despite the rapidly growth of mental health attention focused on the phenomenon of stalking, no empirical research to date has attempted to assess the frequency of repeat offending or attempted to identify predictors of recidivism. A total of 148 stalking and harassment offenders who were court-ordered to undergo a mental health evaluation were followed for a period of 2.5–13 years in order to assess the frequency of repeat offenses and the variables that differentiated high versus low risk offenders. Recidivism data were obtained from a variety of sources, including criminal justice records, mental health records, and reports from probation officers and victims. A number of potential predictor variables were selected on the basis of the existing recidivism literature in other criminal justice populations. Frequency analysis were used to identify variables that significantly differentiated offenders who did and did not reoffend while survival analysis was used to analyze the impact of these covariates on time to reoffense. A total of 49% of the offenders reoffended during the follow-up period, 80% of whom reoffended during the first year. The strongest predictors of recidivism included the presence of a personality disorder, and in particular, a Cluster B personality disorder (i.e., antisocial, borderline, and/or narcissistic). In addition, those offenders with both a personality disorder and a history of substance abuse were significantly more likely to reoffend compared to either of these risk factors alone. Surprisingly, the presence of a delusional disorder (e.g., erotomania) was associated with a lower risk of reoffender. The findings are discussed in terms of the legal system and treatment implications.