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The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons
Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities, or slaves killed by the state--all are deprived of personhood through legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil order. Examining such troubling cases, The Law Is a White Dog tackles key societal How does the law construct our identities? How do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen effects in our daily lives.
Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, The Law Is a White Dog illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.
Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional questions, The Law Is a White Dog illuminates stark truths about civil society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.
364 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 1, 2011
21 people are currently reading
475 people want to read
About the author
Colin Dayan
7 books6 followersColin Dayan, is the Robert Penn Warren Professor in the Humanities at Vanderbilt University, where she teaches American Studies, comparative literature, and the religious and legal history of the Americas.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
May 18, 2020
This book was a bitch to find. I tried to find it in the Boston library system, Cleveland library system, and the Denver system, in any format, without success. I felt foolish when I found out it was available for free online— if anyone else is struggling, here’s the link: https://muse.jhu.edu/book/36622.
The book starts off with a description of the very first case I read in law school: the Ackley house, where a judge reversed the sale of a home, on the grounds that the owner of a home, Ms. Ackley, was legally obligated to advise the buyers prior to sale that the house was, to her knowledge, haunted by Revolutionary War ghosts.
The author tells this story to highlight how absurd the law can be sometimes—stripping people of their personhood (e.g. slaves, immigrants, Guantanamo detainees, people convicted of crimes) or granting personhood to things which are decidedly not people (corporations, dead people, fetuses) whose rights can outweigh those of actual people.
The author’s overall point is that the law clings to tradition and to precedent to such an extent that it renders law practically meaningless. “The word-magic of legal fiction remains a false assertion of the privileged kind, made by those in power to wield ambiguous, even spectacular effects.”
I especially liked the chapter on prisoners and the author’s incredulity with the legal contortions that allow prison wardens to, for example, deprive prisoners of other humans (solitary confinement) for years at a time; to take away their art and hang it up to showcase their prison but not allow the prisoners to keep anything they make because “anything they produce is the property of the prison”; to refuse to allow them to practice their religion merely because it inconveniences the prison; and to refuse to allow them to read virtually anything but the most narrow of materials, forbidding even newspapers of all kinds.
Interestingly, the author compares the dehumanization of inmates to the devaluation of dogs, both of whom, in a lot of ways, share the same rights or lack thereof: stripped of rights like their bodily freedom, speech, and religion, inmates scarcely hold more rights than dogs do. The “legal value” of both dogs and inmates is often defined by their value to others, rather than their intrinsic value—prisoners are defined only by the harm they have done to others, and in legal cases where someone kills a pet dog, “the dead dog exists only insofar as it elicits human feeling.” Plus, the author points out, because of this dehumanization, “no country kills more dogs or imprisons more people than the United States.”
The law, the author argues, has become a kind of sorcery, akin to the rationalizations of Cotton Mather in the witchcraft trials. If the law has the ability to kill (in the form of “civil death,” or stripping of personhood— i.e. as of convicted felons) and resurrect, what does that mean about the literal and figurative body of the average citizen? Is it always a plaything, or property, of the law? Alive, or possessing personhood, only because law gave it to them? Do they not have the right to be legally, socially, civilly, and literally alive, intrinsically?
The title is a reference to the author’s childhood in Atlanta, citing this poem:
The law was angry
The law was rabid
It came upon you in the night
The patrolers
Seeking you out
They always came with a white dog
They were white dogs
With their white cone hoods
And their white capes
Ghosts in the night
The law is still a white dog, the author tells us. It’s ferocious and irrational and it’s coming for your legal personhood, so God help you if you ever find yourself in one of the many categories of people who are stripped of their legal identity.
The book starts off with a description of the very first case I read in law school: the Ackley house, where a judge reversed the sale of a home, on the grounds that the owner of a home, Ms. Ackley, was legally obligated to advise the buyers prior to sale that the house was, to her knowledge, haunted by Revolutionary War ghosts.
The author tells this story to highlight how absurd the law can be sometimes—stripping people of their personhood (e.g. slaves, immigrants, Guantanamo detainees, people convicted of crimes) or granting personhood to things which are decidedly not people (corporations, dead people, fetuses) whose rights can outweigh those of actual people.
The author’s overall point is that the law clings to tradition and to precedent to such an extent that it renders law practically meaningless. “The word-magic of legal fiction remains a false assertion of the privileged kind, made by those in power to wield ambiguous, even spectacular effects.”
I especially liked the chapter on prisoners and the author’s incredulity with the legal contortions that allow prison wardens to, for example, deprive prisoners of other humans (solitary confinement) for years at a time; to take away their art and hang it up to showcase their prison but not allow the prisoners to keep anything they make because “anything they produce is the property of the prison”; to refuse to allow them to practice their religion merely because it inconveniences the prison; and to refuse to allow them to read virtually anything but the most narrow of materials, forbidding even newspapers of all kinds.
Interestingly, the author compares the dehumanization of inmates to the devaluation of dogs, both of whom, in a lot of ways, share the same rights or lack thereof: stripped of rights like their bodily freedom, speech, and religion, inmates scarcely hold more rights than dogs do. The “legal value” of both dogs and inmates is often defined by their value to others, rather than their intrinsic value—prisoners are defined only by the harm they have done to others, and in legal cases where someone kills a pet dog, “the dead dog exists only insofar as it elicits human feeling.” Plus, the author points out, because of this dehumanization, “no country kills more dogs or imprisons more people than the United States.”
The law, the author argues, has become a kind of sorcery, akin to the rationalizations of Cotton Mather in the witchcraft trials. If the law has the ability to kill (in the form of “civil death,” or stripping of personhood— i.e. as of convicted felons) and resurrect, what does that mean about the literal and figurative body of the average citizen? Is it always a plaything, or property, of the law? Alive, or possessing personhood, only because law gave it to them? Do they not have the right to be legally, socially, civilly, and literally alive, intrinsically?
The title is a reference to the author’s childhood in Atlanta, citing this poem:
The law was angry
The law was rabid
It came upon you in the night
The patrolers
Seeking you out
They always came with a white dog
They were white dogs
With their white cone hoods
And their white capes
Ghosts in the night
The law is still a white dog, the author tells us. It’s ferocious and irrational and it’s coming for your legal personhood, so God help you if you ever find yourself in one of the many categories of people who are stripped of their legal identity.
September 28, 2012
A "white dog" was a dog trained to attack any black person. This book is original and amazing. Exposes a lot about the racial foundations of mass incarceration and police brutality in the U.S., the prison house of nations.
November 27, 2024
Gets a little out over its skis at times (in classic aughts crit theory fashion), but is genuinely impressive for its quality of writing and breadth of references. Has a powerful thesis—law, beyond reflecting the social construction of personhood, actively participates in it, largely using the power of ritual to do so—but Dayan doesn’t deepen it much further than that, which I found disappointing. She does run it through a very interesting and eclectic set of expressions, though, including an entire chapter on the history of dogs in English and American common law, in case that sort of thing appeals to you too. Passes the most important test for books like this, ultimately, which is to write about the U.S. carceral state (and particularly the use of solitary confinement) with the due recognition of its profound evils.
May 18, 2024
"Like the sorcery that chains the spirit to dog flesh, juridical reason defines a new legal body that buries the mind, recognizing only the corporeal husk emptied of thought." Assigned by one of my favorite professors, this is a stunning book about the law’s ghostly work + its violent terrestrial consequences.
March 3, 2024
I bought this book in maybe 2013 and have "read in it" at least 8 times since then. Each "read in" session was maybe a half hour. Every time, I thought it was fascinating and important and that I wanted to come back to it when I had time for drill down and focus. I work a lot and was a book reviewer for a few years, so I tend to gulp down books when I can. This book is not gulpable.
When I was just reaching in and reading for a while, I'd end each session thinking it was a 4. When I read it from front to back this weekend, it was a not quite a 3. I really wish the structure were a little tighter. I'm donating it to the library today, and I think they'll put it on their used books shelf, where it'll find a good home. I can't say there's anything wrong with it. It's strong and important. I just think times have changed in terms of spoiled readers expecting lots and lots of subheads, and I think my capacity for sadness is temporarily overloaded. --Out of fairness, I'm rating it a 3.
When I was just reaching in and reading for a while, I'd end each session thinking it was a 4. When I read it from front to back this weekend, it was a not quite a 3. I really wish the structure were a little tighter. I'm donating it to the library today, and I think they'll put it on their used books shelf, where it'll find a good home. I can't say there's anything wrong with it. It's strong and important. I just think times have changed in terms of spoiled readers expecting lots and lots of subheads, and I think my capacity for sadness is temporarily overloaded. --Out of fairness, I'm rating it a 3.
August 19, 2022
A little bit more theoretical than I wanted. An interesting exploration of the legal mysticism of the human. The dog piece was ok, but I think I care less about interspecies work than Dayan.
September 29, 2018
This rather strange book is written at the intersection of literature and law. While the topic is interesting, I could have done with less metaphor and more coherent argumentation. Nonetheless an interesting if very disturbing read.
April 28, 2015
On one hand, this book provides interesting riffs on a very real theme, with some provoking claims. On the other, its argumentation is sloppy and its references are fast-and-loose. If The Law is a White Dog inspires, it is in spite of its dubious scholarship, not because of it.
Want to read
November 16, 2011Read
September 27, 2013346.73012 D2755 2011
August 27, 2014
Dayan's writing is both esoteric and completely compelling. This text is an excellent mix of metaphor, law, literature, and metaphysics.
March 27, 2017
Dayan doesn't write, she conjures. Stunning book.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews