Description: For most, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This interdisciplinary collection looks for law in the "wrong places"--sites and spaces in which no formal law appears--geographic regions beyond the law's reach, everyday practices ungoverned by law, works of art that have escaped law's constraints. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture.
Brief description: Marianne Constable is Professor of Rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford), Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton), and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law, and Knowledge (Chicago).
Review Quotes: This extraordinary collection is a veritable lost and found of law's traces. Moving across disciplines, it offers rich and surprising refractions of law's ephemera: What do we learn about the opacity of governance when we look for justice beyond its expected 'place' in the confines of textual or rhetorical jurisprudence? What is revealed when the legal inhabits the sacred, informs the literary, performs geography, polices time, seeps through the agora, regenerates itself within bodies? This indispensable book excavates how seemingly robust juridical processes may teeter in concert with more fragile norms for mobility, status, and human affinity.---Patricia J. Williams, Columbia Law School