Postmodern Jurisprudence: Contesting Genres

It has become a common place of contemporary legal theory, particularly postmodernist legal theory, to reject modernist jurisprudence’s assumption of law’s disciplinary autonomy. Within this enthusiasm for interdisciplinary approaches to law, what is less common is detailed analysis of precisely how interdisciplinarity is figured, rhetorically and epistemologically, in the discourse of contemporary legal theory. It is with a view to detailed analysis of this kind that this paper emerges. Its aim is to explore in detail how interdisciplinarity might be figured, and with what consequences, in the jurisprudence of postmodernity. The particular site of this exploration will be Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington with Shaun McVeigh’s Postmodern Jurisprudence: the Law of Text in the Texts of law. Published in 1991, this text remains widely influential – it has become a contemporary classic in its genre. It is not the intention of this paper, however, to represent this text as exemplary. Rather, this paper intends to read this text in its particularity, to focus on its particular vision of postmodern jurisprudence. Specifically, this paper argues that Postmodern Jurisprudence figures interdisciplinarity in terms of genre; and that this understanding of interdisciplinarity is problematised by the unacknowledged contradictions between the different conceptions of genre – one associated with Jacques Derrida and the other associated with Jean-François Lyotard – which the text invokes. This paper argues that the project of postmodern jurisprudence – as title and as label – appears rather differently if it is imagined, on the one hand (following Derrida) according to the logic of the passe-partout and, on the other hand (following Lyotard), according to the logic of the differend. The paper concludes that this internal tension should at least give us pause for thought when approaching the complex phenomenon of interdisciplinarity in postmodern legal scholarship more generally.     

Reformation of the Guam legislature: The politics of style over substance

Public cynicism regarding governmental inefficiency, waste and corruption in the US territory of Guam has resulted in the introduction of a series of initiatives intended to reform the local legislature, the Guam Senate. The initiatives recommend restructuring the legislative branch by reducing the total number of senators and limiting the number of consecutive terms that can be served in office. This research analyses these proposals in order to determine their advisability. The conclusion reached is that a modest reduction in the size of the senate is appropriate, legally mandated term limits are not. In the final analysis, legislative reform can be reduced to instrumental tinkering while the most serious problem facing the island is a resolution of the systemic issue of political status.     

US citizenship policy in the pacific territory of Guam

In 1950 the United States Congress approved the Organic Act of the Territorial Government of Guam which provided the island with a republican form of local government and American citizenship. The Act, however, does not completely fulfill the requirements of US Constitutional principles and law. Guamanians do not have representation in the Federal Government and do not pay Federal income taxes. The Organic Act produced a strange and confusing relationship between the United States and Guam. The contention of this research is that the fundamental problem with US citizenship policy in the Territory of Guam is (1) constitutional ambiguity, and (2) associated misconceptions concerning the theory and practice of American federalism, both of which might be remedied through either semi‐sovereignty of American statehood, or Guamanian independence.