The Fate of Law

by Austin Sarat (Editor), Thomas R. Kearns (Editor)

For law and legal theory the end of the twentieth century is a time of contradiction; while the newly emerging politics of Eastern Europe seek to establish a new rule of law, voices in this country proclaim the "death of law." For the former, law provides hope for stability and fairness. For the latter, the fundamental values that provide a grounding for legality seem no longer secure or satisfying. The Fate of Law is a collection of five original essays, each of which discusses the problems and prospects of law in the late twentieth century. The essays pay particular attention to the impact of broad intellectual and political movements, especially feminism and postmodernism, on law and legal theory.

The Fate of Law investigates what happens under the critical scrutiny of those movements and in an era of growing skepticism about law's central claim to objectivity, neutrality, and reason. It describes the struggles that ensue and the responses that are made. Each of the essays that comprise this books is written in its own style and voice; each makes it own judgments and assessments.

Genres: Law

298 pages, Paperback

First published October 1, 1991

About the author

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College.

Reviews

[Durakov · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this only for the last essay, which I couldn't find anywhere else, called "A Journey Through Forgetting: Towards a Jurisprudence of Violence" by Sarat and Kearns. For those looking for legal theories following up on Walter Benjamin's "Critique of Violence", Derrida's "Force of Law", and Robert Cover's "Violence and the Word", this is pretty essential reading. It presents a short history of law's story as told by law, notably through the way in which it attempts to cover up its own connection with violent acts, e.g. execution, torture, imprisonment, etc, or, as Cover said, to conceal the fact that prisoners "do not walk themselves into prisons".

They then apply this notion of forgetting to the most lasting and most famous juridical theories of the last 500 years, starting with Hobbes' Leviathan, through John Austin, Alexander Hamilton and the American political-legal tradition, and up to the "rule" based and "normative" turn of H.L.A. Hart and Ronald Dworkin. At each stage, they highlight the way the legal theories serves to highlight or conceal the violence at the center of a legal system, from Hobbes overwhelming violence keeping "all in awe" to Hart and Dworkin's downsizing to the point of eradicating violence in favor of "rule-based behavior".