Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places

For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the “wrong places”—sites and spaces in which no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law’s constraints.

Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places brings together essays by leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric, to look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture.

Many essays in this volume look for law precisely in the kinds of “wrong places” where there appears to be no law. They find in these places not only reflections and remains of law, but also rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and about law’s meaning and function. Other essays do the opposite: rather than looking for law in places where law does not obviously appear, they look in statute books and courtrooms from perspectives that are usually presumed to have nothing to say about law.

Looking at law sideways, or upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can gain when law is denied its ostensibly proper domain.

Contributors: Kathryn Abrams, Daniel Boyarin, Wendy Brown, Marianne Constable, Samera Esmeir, Daniel Fisher, Sara Ludin, Saba Mahmood, Rebecca McLennan, Ramona Naddaff, Beth Piatote, Sarah Song, Christopher Tomlins, Leti Volpp, Bryan Wagner

Introduction
Marianne Constable, Leti Volpp, and Bryan Wagner, 1

Places

1. The Wild Life of Law: Domesticating Nature in the Bering Sea, c. 1893
Rebecca M. McLennan, 15

2. Before Emptiness: On the Destructiveness and Impotence of Law
Samera Esmeir, 37

3. Spun Dry: Mobility and Jurisdiction in Northern Australia
Daniel Fisher, 62

4. Signs of Authority in Indian Country
Beth H. Piatote, 85

Membership

5. Signs of Law
Leti Volpp, 103

6. After Obergefell: On Marriage and Belonging in Carson McCullers’s Member of the Wedding
Sarah Song, 131

7. Secularism, Family Law, and Gender Inequality
Saba Mahmood, 145

Religion

8. When Persons Become Firms and Firms Become Persons: Neoliberal Jurisprudence and Evangelical Christianity in Burwell v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc.
Wendy Brown, 169

9. Is There Jewish Law? The Case of Josephus
Daniel Boyarin, 189

10. The Protestant Power of Attorney of 1531: A Legalistic History of the Early Reformation in Germany
Sara Ludin, 201

11. Looking for Law in The Confessions of Nat Turner
Christopher Tomlins, 225

Performance

12. A Vigil at the End of the World
Kathryn Abrams, 247

13. Invention and Process in Bilski
Marianne Constable, 258

14. “Erudite Curiosity”: The Trial of Jean-Jacques Pauvert, Publisher of the Complete Works of the Marquis de Sade, Paris 1958
Ramona Naddaff, 273

15. The Trial of Romeo Rosebud
Bryan Wagner, 287

List of Contributors, 299

Index, 303