Indigenous rights discourse in Australia

The ability of Australia's indigenous people to create their own cultural identity and social reality is shaped profoundly by the Australian legal system in various ways. The 1992Mabo decision of the Australian High Court ‘created’ a right to land tenure for Australia's indigenous people. This ‘right’ has been further explicated by federal legislation in the post-Mabo era, in and around law. This essay analyzes the 1992Mabo decision in the context of governmental, judicial and wider social responses to indigenous issues. At several sites, it examines ‘indigenous rights’ discourse to illustrate the shifting meaning of ‘rights’ in legal currency in the indigenous debate. The essay suggests that the ‘rights’ discourse of legal liberalism has not yet provided meaningful plurality in the recognition of indigenous rights.     

Reflections on Waldron’s Archetypes

Jeremy Waldron argued that the government lawyers responsible for the ‘torture memos’ acted unprofessionally by undermining the prohibition on torture. He did so partly on the basis that that the torture prohibition represents a ‘legal archetype’ which cannot be undermined without doing considerable harm to large bodies of law. This paper argues that, however much intuitive appeal Waldron’s archetype-based analysis may have, its force is inherently limited. This is so for two reasons. First, the claim that the torture prohibition is an archetype for non-brutality can only make a meaningful difference to the integrity of the legal order insofar as ‘brutality’ is understood widely. Waldron, though, reads ‘brutality’ in a narrow fashion. Second, and more importantly, the claim that archetypes are uniquely important to legal reasoning and the legal order is deeply problematic.     

德国法学方法论

一般认为,对于一门学术型学科而言,一套方法的存在及由此而形成的方法论至关重要。在德国,法律一直以来都是一门学术型学科。作为被称之为"法学"(字面意思是法律"科学",更确切地说是有关法律的学问)的研究对象,法律以具有一套专门的法学方法论为其特征。在德国大学法学院中,法学方法论是一门非常重要的讲授科目,且围绕这门课程有大量的法学文献。这些文献所讨论的是德国法律人如何(或者更准确地说:应该如何)开展法律工作。德语文献相关讨论中的一个特殊之处在于,在概念上区分"法律解释"与"法的续造"。方法论的讨论涉及制定法解释的各种相关要素、先决条件、不同层级,以及法的续造的合法性等问题。除此之外,还应意识到,对于德国法方法论的讨论是在不同的政治发展历程下展开的。基于此,本文从以下五个一般性话题展开对方法论的讨论:第一,德国、瑞士以及奥地利在方法论上的共性;第二,方法论讨论的规范特征;第三,不同法律领域中所出现的方法论上的差异;第四,法教义学与法学方法论的关系;第五,德国所讨论问题的历史背景。     

His master’s voice: H.L.A. Hart and Lacanian discourse theory

H.L.A. Hart’s jurisprudence seems antithetical to Jacques Lacan’s psychoanalysis. Professor Schroeder argues that, in fact, Hart’s concept of law has surprising similarities to Lacan’s ‘discourse of the Master’. Both reject a command theory of law: subjects do not obey law out of fear. Moreover, both insist that the authority of law is completely independent from its content. Anyone seeking to develop a psychoanalytically sophisticated critical legal theory should reconsider Hart. As insightful as his concept of the symbolic is, Lacan has no expertise in legal systems and does not discuss positive law per se. Although he posited a theory of ethics in his Seventh Seminar and the seeds of a jurisprudence are implicit within his theory, he offers no account of legal right, justice or what Hart misleadingly calls ‘morality’. A Lacanian jurisprudence must, therefore, be supplemented by other sources. Moreover, legal positivists should not dismiss psychoanalysis. As insightful as Hart’s jurisprudence is, his theories of legal subjectivity and linguistics are simplistic and his concept of law too narrow. He describes only one aspect of legal experience: obedience to law. He ignores what most legal actors do: Hart’s concept of law excludes the practice of law. Although Lacan’s ‘master’s discourse’ surprisingly parallels Hart’s jurisprudence, Lacan does not restrict the symbolic to the master’s discourse. It requires three other ‘discourses’. Lacan, therefore, supplements Hart. Specifically, Lacan’s fourth discourse describes the excluded practice of law and provides the mechanism by which ‘morality’ can critique law.

L'impact du discours des droits des détenus et des normes d'équité sur le tribunal disciplinaire carcéral

Over the past two decades, the prisoners rights movement and active judicial intervention in prison law have widely expanded in Canada. This movement has had a significant impact on the emergence of new norms of correctional justice. The recentCorrections and Conditional Release Act, (November 1992), inserts notions of human dignity; due process of law; and to a certain extent, the fundamental rights of prisoners. The aim of this essay is to measure the impact of prisoners rights discourse, and the legal obligation to act fairly towards prisoners, on the practices and quality of disciplinary decisions. Based on observations made at disciplinary hearings in various penitentiaries and interview data derived from the main actors, the author assesses how the ‘judiciarization’ of social relations and the ‘legalization’ of discipline in the prison have contributed to the birth of a more humanized prison and the promotion of human dignity for those people who are incarcerated.      

On Myth,Considered as a Method for Legal Thought

The textual form of law relates to language and not to narration but to myth. Law's text does not develop in the temporal sequence of past-present-future, but spreads by analogy of concentric circles. If ‘normal’ myth is a folklore of people then the law is a myth retold by lawyers. For the sake of separation of legal myth from mythology as a whole, law creates its own rituals. In post-modern societies the mythologization of law becomes even more important as the boundaries between legal and lay communities are challenged. Classical legal theories cannot deal with this change and Kafka's The Trial is as good a jurisprudence as any other legal theory. This revised version was published online in November 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

The Targeted Killing Judgment of the Israeli Supreme Court and the Critique of Legal Violence

The targeted killing judgment of the Israeli Supreme Court has, since it was handed down in December 2006, received a significant amount of attention: praise as well as criticism. Offering neither praise nor criticism, the present article is instead an attempt at a ‘critique’ of the judgment drawing on the German-Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin’s famous essay from 1921, ‘Critique of Violence’. The article focuses on a key aspect of Benjamin’s critique: the distinction between the two modalities of ‘legal violence’—lawmaking or foundational violence and law-preserving or administrative violence. Analysing the fact that the Court exercises jurisdiction over these killings in the first place, the decision on the applicable law as well as the interpretation of that law, the article finds that the targeted killing judgment collapses this distinction in a different way from that foreseen by Benjamin. Hence, the article argues, the targeted killing judgment is best understood as a form of administrative foundational violence. In conclusion Judith Butler’s reading of Benjamin’s notion of ‘divine violence’ is considered, particularly his use of the commandment, ‘thou shalt not kill’, as a non-violent violence that must be waged against the kind of legal violence of which the targeted killing judgment is exemplary.     

Strategies of Rupture

The paper is an exploration in critical legal theory, and argues for a return to thinking of critical legal intervention in political-strategic terms. If the insistence is on strategies of rupture it is because the attention is on what registers as resistant, neither reducible to—nor co-optable by—the order it seeks to resist. It is argued that if law is to offer redress to injustice it has to offer terms that can break incongruently, irreducibly so, with the order of capital, and its economy of representation, not couching critique within its terms, taking flight into the mysticism and escapism of the ‘ethical turn’, or entrusting critique unconditionally to the deconstructive energies of the law. The paper explores how difficult the task facing critical legal theory is in view of law’s power of ‘homology’ and its ‘mechanisms of deadlock’. Both within the courtroom (the focus here is on the tactics of rupture of the lawyer Vergès) and outside it, a return to a strategic understanding of law underlies its deployment as means of critique (‘simple’ or ‘immanent’) or object of confrontation rather than horizon of communicative exchange.     

What’s Inside and Outside the Law?

In this article I take up a conceptual question: What is the distinction between ‘the law’ and the behavior the law regulates, or, as I formulate it, the distinction between what is ‘inside’ the law and what is ‘outside’ it? That conceptual question is in play in (at least) three different doctrinal domains: the constitutional law doctrines regarding the limits on the delegation of legislative powers; the criminal law doctrines regarding mistakes of law; and the constitutional rights doctrines that turn on the distinction between state action and the acts of non-state actors. I argue that legal doctrines should turn solely on normative considerations and should not turn on answers to conceptual questions. However, the doctrines I discuss appear to turn on the conceptual question regarding what is ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ the law. I show how each of these doctrinal areas appears to raise this conceptual issue, and I explain how the doctrines might or might not escape being held hostage to conceptual controversy.     

Derrida,Semiotics and Justice

In this essay, one of Derrida’s early texts, Plato’s pharmacy, is analysed in detail, more specifically in relation to its reflections on writing and its relation to law. This analysis takes place with reference to a number of Derrida’s other texts, in particular those on Freud. It is especially Freud’s texts on dream interpretation and on the dream-work which are of assistance in understanding the background to Derrida’s analysis of writing in Plato’s pharmacy. The essay shows the close relation between Derrida’s analysis of Plato’s texts and Freud’s study of the dream-work. The forces at work in dreams, it appears, are at play in all texts, which in turn explains Derrida’s contentions in relation to the pharmakon as providing the condition of possibility of Plato’s texts. The essay furthermore points to the continuity between this ‘early’ text of Derrida and his ‘later’, seemingly more politico-legal texts of the 1990s. A close reading of Plato’s pharmacy, with its investigation via ‘writing’ of the foundations of metaphysics, and thus also of the Western concept of law, is obligatory should one wish to comprehend how Derrida attempts to exceed the restricted economy of metaphysics through his analysis of concepts such as justice and hospitality.     

Irregular States or the Semiotics of Knight-Errantry

This article examines the transformation of the Order of St John (also known as the Knights of Malta) from a crusading and piratic entity (periodically in Jerusalem, Cyprus, Rhodes and Malta) into an irregular state actor without territory (in Rome). Specifically, it looks at the political rationales through which the Order has been historically constituted as an international subject and currently enacted as an “irregular state”, and evaluates the function of international legal discourse in making up for its missing territory, the supposedly ‘hard’ and ‘objective’ condition of statehood under international law.     

Ideas of Transgression and Buddhist Monks

It is implicit in a western understanding of law that law is a series of generalisations, which are universal and which aim to promote social community. At the same time ‘law’ is expected to operate in a territory (rather than for specific people or castes) where it applies, and to apply to a community of rights-bearing subjects. Such a view of law may have reflected part of the values of the European Enlightenment where law was seen as a rational science and where religion has been seen as excluded from law. An alternative route in the study of law is to study ‘transgressions’. The literature on ‘transgression’ suggests transgressions form an amorphous category and a proper examination of them is not closed by the normal taxonomy between the studies of ‘law as obedience’ versus ‘laws as violation’. In one sense transgressions are part of the rule, yet a separate category in their own right. I use the concept of ‘transgression’ to attempt to describe the legal significance of ‘violations’ in the rules of the Buddhist monks (Vinaya). I conclude that a proper consideration of the role of sexual desire in the Vinaya allows me to show that ‘violations were accepted within an institutional framework, that ‘violators’ were not excluded from the order of monks and that sexual experience could be seen as an alternative, if controversial, path of spiritual development.     

Leiter on the Legal Realists

In this essay reviewing Brian Leiter’s recent book Naturalizing Jurisprudence, I focus on two positions that distinguish Leiter’s reading of the American legal realists from those offered in the past. The first is his claim that the realists thought the law is only locally indeterminate – primarily in cases that are appealed. The second is his claim that they did not offer a prediction theory of law, but were instead committed to a standard positivist theory. Leiter’s reading is vulnerable, because he fails to discuss in detail those passages from the realists that inspired past interpretations. My goal is to see how Leiter’s reading fares when these passages are considered. I argue that Leiter is right that the realists’ indeterminacy thesis has only a local scope. Those passages that appear to claim that the law is globally indeterminate actually address three other topics: judicial supremacy, judges’ roles as finders of fact, and the moral obligation to adjudicate as the law commands. With respect to the prediction theory, however, I conclude that Leiter’s position cannot be defended. Indeed the realists offered two ‘prediction’ theories of law. According to the first, which is best described as a decision theory, the law concerning an event is whatever concrete judgment a court will issue when the event is litigated. According to the second, the law is reduced, not to concrete judgments, but to regularities of judicial (and other official) behavior in a jurisdiction. I end this essay with the suggestion that the realists’ advocacy of the second prediction theory indirectly vindicates Leiter’s reading of the realists as prescient jurisprudential naturalists.     

Becoming-Animal,Becoming-Detainee: Encountering Human Rights Discourse in Guantanamo

The Guantanamo detention facility, from its early days an emblem for human rights abuses, is a space where legal subjectivity of detainees is contested or even permanently suspended. This essay argues that we should look for the underlying rationale for this treatment not in the politicians who pursue intelligence, security, and strategic interest, or indeed even revenge for 9/11, but rather in the logic—or the ontology—that drives the present political and legal system. This is not to say, of course, that politicians play no role, or that they are mere ‘victims’ of social and political power relations—far from it; yet, it has to be acknowledged that the foundational assumptions on which the existing system operates create conditions of possibility for such degrading actions and exclusionary politics. This paper will first explore these philosophical foundations that enable such an understanding of exclusionary legal subjectivity as we see practiced in Guantanamo, amongst other places; secondly, it will search for an alternative logic of legal subjectivity as a ‘foundation’ for rights. Gilles Deleuze’s notion of ‘becoming’ as a potentially facilitative practice for an ‘open’ notion of legal subjectivity, as well as Alain Badiou’s account of ethics and evil, which points to a more ‘inclusive’ yet ‘situational’ understanding of human rights, will prove particularly useful here.     

“Sociologically speaking”: Law,sexuality and social change

Historically, legal discourse affirms the apparent naturalness of the heterosexual family, contributing to the invisibility of social processes which privilege heterosexuality. In this paper, Herman examines ways in which this naturalization and invisibility are the result of the delegitimation of knowledges which challenge the ‘Truth’ of law. Exploring the role of the sociologist as expert witness in the recent Mossop decisions, but also aspects of other recent lesbian and gay litigation, Herman raises a number of questions about the relationship between meaning and truth in law, and the constitution of sexual identity through the legal process. In so doing, she raises questions central to feminist theory.     

The Role of Narratives in Legal Education

The significance of narrative as the primary form of human communication forms the basis of this paper. Following a brief consideration of the natural inter-relationship between law and narrative, the author goes on to discuss the more specific application of a narrative approach to legal scholarship and legal education. The paper sets out the findings of a practical research project that took as its inspiration James Boyd White’s portrayal of the law student as a creative and imaginative thinker, and Martha Nussbaum’s claim that it is through the power of ‘narrative imagination’ that we gain a broader appreciation and understanding of humanity. It explains how a group of law students participated in ‘the Narrative Research Project’ at the University of Leicester; participating in story-telling seminars and creating their own fictional narratives from appellate case reports. It describes the students’ reaction to the project as heartening in the sense that they became more aware of the significant role that human actors play in legal proceedings, but it also expresses doubts over the extent to which such an approach can, by itself, cultivate humanity in the law school.     

Constructing Women Who Experience Male Violence: Criminal Legal Discourse and Individual Experiences

This article examines the relationship between how women who experience violence from a male partner construct themselves, and how criminal legal discourse constructs female victims of violence. It is argued that in both arenas, women are constructed according to norms which emanate from a discourse of conventional femininity which operates together with a practice of shame. Utilising empirical data gained from qualitative interviews with women who experienced male violence, the article contends that the construction of the female victim of violence in criminal legal discourses as imbued with stereotypical ‘feminine’ characteristics such as passivity and weakness, may influence these women’s own construction and understanding of themselves. The existence of a practice of shame further consolidates the self-regulation of the women themselves to these norms of femininity. This construction is posited to be problematic as the experiences of women of male violence rarely ‘fit’ within these explanations. The article contends that in order to better understand women’s experiences of male violence; both criminal legal and individual women’s discourses need to be read in terms of the power, knowledge and effects which they exert upon individual women. It is argued that this alternative reading of these discourses has the potential for transformation as they are invested in the subject.

Family as a commonsensical device and its place in law★

This paper is in five main parts. The first introduces membership categorisation analysis (MCA) as originally outlined by Harvey Sacks and, here, as a possible extension of semiotic analysis. MCA is broadly a contribution to discourse analysis in general and to conversation analysis in particular. The approach concerns membership categorisation devices such as family, the categories they can contain such as ‘mother’, ‘father’, ‘child’, etc. and the category-bound activities or predicates commonsensically attachable to such categories. The second section looks at the legal background to family law in Australia and shows that its basic assumption is, by and large and with some exceptions, to work from categories (what people are) rather than from predicates (what they in fact do). In the third section, we examine a particular Family Court case (Re Patrick) which highlights the contestation between these approaches. Following this, we examine some recent shifts in the Australian states and territories towards more predicationally-based legislation and argue for their coherence in contemporary society and its increasingly flexible conceptions of what may constitute a family. Finally, we return to the question of semiotics generally and make a case for our MCA-based distinctions as contributions to a possible semiotics of law. In the beginning was the deed – Goethe     

The Turn to Imagination in Legal Theory: The Re-Enchantment of the World?

Various contemporary legal theorists have turned to ‘imagination’ as a keyword in their accounts of law. This turn is fruitfully considered as a potential response to the modern condition diagnosed by Max Weber as ‘disenchantment’. While disenchantment is often seen as a symptom of a post-metaphysical age, it is best understood as the consummation of metaphysics and not its overcoming. Law’s participation in disenchantment is illustrated by way of Holmes’ parable of the dragon in ‘The Path of the Law’, which illustrates the rationalization and demystification of law. Four ideal–typical turns to ‘imagination’ are identified: the theoretical (turning to imagination as synthesis), the progressive (imagination as empathy), the transformative (imagination as invention) and the nostalgic (imagination as attunement). Most of these turns to imagination remain complicit with disenchantment. ‘Imagination’ often appears only to be harnessed in the service of more conventional keywords of legal thought: theoreticians turn to imagination as synthesis to serve as a form of super-reason; progressives turn to imagination as empathy to make law a more effective instrument; transformatives turn to imagination as invention to serve as a form of super-will. By turning to imagination as attunement, nostalgics come closest to accepting a world that is not masterable, i.e. they come closest to accepting an enchantment that is a gift and not the product of our imaginations. Indeed, modern imaginations are themselves symptoms of disenchantment. If Weber’s diagnostic calls for a human response, it cannot be one of overcoming disenchantment by imaginative re-enchantment: it belongs integrally to enchantment to exceed any and all human capacities.