Law in the Courts of Love traces the literary history and diversity of past legal systems. These 'minor jurisprudences' range from the spiritual laws of the courts of conscience to the code and judgements of love handed down by women's courts in medieval France. Professor Goodrich presents the 15th Century Courts of Love in Paris as one instance of an alternative jurisdiction drawn from the diversities of the legal and literary past. Their textual records are correspondingly mixed in genre...

The emblem book was invented by the humanist lawyer Andrea Alciato in 1531. The preponderance of juridical and normative themes, of images of rule and infraction, of obedience and error in the emblem books is critical to their purpose and interest. This book outlines the history of the emblem tradition as a juridical genre, along with the concept of, and training in, obiter depicta, in things seen along the way to judgment. It argues that these books depict norms and abuses in classically ...

Elgar Advanced Introductions are stimulating and thoughtful introductions to major fields in the social sciences, business and law, expertly written by the world’s leading scholars. Designed to be accessible yet rigorous, they offer concise and lucid surveys of the substantive and policy issues associated with discrete subject areas.Peter Goodrich presents a unique introduction to the concept of jurisliterature. Highlighting how lawyers have been extraordinarily productive of liter...

Nietzsche and Legal Theory is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, crim...

The genealogy of legal office is pieced together here to rediscover the scope and ambition of a role that has been largely lost to conscious self-reflection. Organized around a concern with the inheritance of juristic traditions, institutions, and forms of life, the contributors to this book take up the question of how a jurist might learn to live, or die, with law. The collection invites readers to reconsider fundamental questions: What responsibilities accompany the jurist’s role? How do...

The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from p...

This book brings together an interdisciplinary range of scholars from across the spectrum of disciplines, generations, and geopolitical divides to revisit Jacques Derrida’s account of law, violence, and justice.Deconstruction is variously a philosophy of aporia, a method of patience, a practice of paradoxes, an ontography of uncertainty, a hermeneutics of escalation that sought not only to challenge metaphysical complacencies but also to transgress boundaries, test limits, and abov...

A judge springs out of his car on the way to court in downtown Chicago and takes photographs of an inflatable rat. A while later he inserts these photographs into a decision involving another insufflated rodent used in a union protest. The increasing use of images in case law and precedent in the common law world provides a novel visual atlas of how lawyers see. Using a corpus of many images drawn from decisions in different common law jurisdictions across the globe, Judicial Uses of I...

Laws of Transgression offers multiple perspectives on the story of Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911), a chamber president of the German Supreme Court who was institutionalized after claiming God had communicated with him, desiring to make him into a woman. Schreber was not only a successful judge, but was also to become the author of one of the most commented upon texts in psychiatric literature, Memoirs of My Nervous Illness. Published in 1903, this remarkable work docume...

This timely and assured book provides a unique guide to critical legal studies which is one of the most exciting developments within contemporary jurisprudence. It is the first book to systematically apply a critical philosophy to the substance of common law. The book develops a coruscating and interdisciplinary overview of the politics and cultural significance of the institutions of the law.

The essays collected here under the governing signs, Law, Text, Terror have their origins in a singular and topical desire. Their motive is most immediately that of acknowledging the massive and eccentric contribution of the philologist, psychoanalyst and Romanist jurist Pierre Legendre to the study of legal institutions and juridical practices. He has unceasingly asked the question 'why law?' and in endeavouring to answer that question, in the course of over twenty-five books pub...