Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

Austin Sarat

Description

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law is a field-defining collection of work at the intersection of law, cultural analysis and cultural studies. Over the past few decades the marked turn toward claims and policy arguments based on cultural identity-such as ethnicity, race, or religion-has pointed up the urgent need for legal studies to engage cultural critiques. Exploration of legal issues through cultural analyses provides a rich supplement to other approaches-including legal realism, law and economics, and law and society. As Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon demonstrate, scholars of the law have begun to mine the humanities for new theoretical tools and kinds of knowledge. Crucial to this effort is cultural studies, with its central focus on the relationship between knowledge and power.Drawing on legal scholarship, literary criticism, psychoanalytic theory, and anthropology, the essays collected here exemplify the contributions cultural analysis and cultural studies make to interdisciplinary legal study. Some of these broad-ranging pieces describe particular approaches to the cultural study of the law, while others look at specific moments where the law and culture intersect. Contributors confront the deep connections between law, social science, and post-World War II American liberalism; examine the traffic between legal and late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century scientific discourses; and investigate, through a focus on recovered memory, the ways psychotherapy is absorbed into the law. The essayists also explore specific moments where the law is forced to comprehend the world beyond its boundaries, illuminating its dependence on a series of unacknowledged aesthetic, psychological, and cultural assumptions-as in Aldolph Eichmann's 1957 trial, hiv-related cases, and the U.S. Supreme Court's recent efforts to define the role of race in the construction of constitutionally adequate voting districts.Contributors. Paul Berman, Peter Brooks, Wai Chee Dimock, Anthony Farley, Shoshanna Felman, Carol Greenhouse, Paul Kahn, Naomi Mezey, Tobey Miller, Austin Sarat, Jonathan Simon, Alison Young

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• Cultural studies

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 03 juillet 2003
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822384755
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

Moving Beyond Legal Realism

Edited by Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S

Durham and London 2003

∫2003 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 8

Typeset in Trump Mediaeval by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book. The text of this book was originally published as a special issue of the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, vol. 13, no. 1 (2001). ‘‘A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law’’ is∫2003 by Shoshana Felman.

Contents

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Situation of Legal Scholarship / Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon 1

I

Approaches to the Cultural Study of Law

Law as Culture / Naomi Mezey

37

What It Is and What It Isn’t: Cultural Studies Meets Graduate Student Labor / Toby Miller 73

Telling a Less Suspicious Story: Notes toward a Nonskeptical Approach to Legal/Cultural Analysis / Paul Schiff Berman 105

Freedom, Autonomy, and the Cultural Study of Law / Paul W. Kahn

II

Deploying Law and Legal Ideas in Culture and Society

Ethnography and Democracy: Texts and Contexts in the United States in the 1990s / Carol J. Greenhouse 191

Rules of Law, Laws of Science / Wai Chee Dimock

Law, Therapy, Culture / Peter Brooks

245

220

154

III

Reading Legal Events

A Ghost in the House of Justice: Death and the Language of the Law / Shoshana Felman 259

Lacan and Voting Rights / Anthony Paul Farley

304

‘‘Into the Blue’’: The Image Written on Law / Alison Young

Contributors

Index

355

353

327

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law

Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and

the Situation of Legal Scholarship Austin Sarat and Jonathan Simon

verywhere, it seems, culture is in ascendance. More and more social groups E are claiming to have distinctive cultures and are demanding recognition of their cultural distinctiveness. Identity politics has merged with cultural poli- ∞ tics so that to have an identity one must now also have a culture. As a result, it sometimes seems as if almost every ethnic, religious, or social group seeks to have its ‘‘culture’’ recognized, and for precisely this reason the cultural itself has become a subject of political life to a greater extent than in the past.

The Death of the Social and the Turn to Culture

The backlash against the proliferation of cultures and identities, and what is ≤ called the ‘‘politics of recognition,’’ has been vehement. Politicians proclaim ‘‘culture wars’’ in an effort to reassert both the meaning and centrality of certain ≥ allegedly transcendent human values. Debates about the meaning and signifi- cance of culture become arguments about ‘‘civilization’’ itself, in which ac- knowledgment of cultural pluralism and its accompanying decanonization of the ‘‘sacred’’ texts of the Western tradition is treated as undermining national ∂ unity, national purpose, and the meaning of being ‘‘American.’’ Political con- tests are increasingly fought over values and symbols, with different parties ∑ advancing different cultural programs. With the decline of ideology as an organizing force in international rela- tions, culture seems to provide another vantage point from which to understand ∏ new polarities. In addition, the cache of the cultural is increasingly resonant in