Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series
presents
Marianne Constable
UC Berkeley – Rhetoric Department
Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts
Thursday, March 22, 2012
12:30 - 2:00
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen's Park
In opposition to a strict legal realist distinction between law-in-action and law-on-the-books, “Our Word is Our Bond” shows how law acts through speech. It argues that law and language alike are sites of judgments and ascriptions of responsibility. Legal acts are not simply the conventional speech acts of subjects, a la J.L.Austin though; they are social acts that require the joint participation of speaker and hearer. Further, they are not only performative utterances, but what Stanley Cavell calls “passionate utterances,” insofar as they are designed to have an effect on the “you” to whom they are addressed. They aim to recall to their addressees the practical knowledge of “we”- or “you” and “I” in dialogue - who share a common tongue.
Thinking in terms of what legal speech does brings “justice,” or the appeal that is ostensibly made in claims of law, under the purview of the study of law. Such an account does not deny the effects of powerful law, nor the relevance of rules to legal education. But in a world in which assertions of positive law do not exhaust claims of law, approaching law as language reconfigures partial sociolegal and doctrinal accounts of law. It affirms that not only for the state, but in a multiplicity of communities, matters of language and speech – of their proper use, of how to name and judge, of translation and access – are the matters of law.
Marianne Constable has published broadly on a range of topics in legal rhetoric and philosophy. She is working on two projects: a history of the "new unwritten law," which ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a century ago; and a book on legal speech acts. She is the author of Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (2005). Her earlier book, The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge, won the Law and Society Association's J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History. She is the author of articles on, among other topics, Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of "community," the role of law in the liberal arts, Frederick Schauer on rules, Robert Cover on violence, Montesquieu on systems and Vico on legal education. She has co-edited two books on law and society and has served on numerous editorial boards relating to law and humanities and law and society. She was a Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during 2005-06; her awards include the NEH, a prize for undergraduate research mentoring at UCB, and the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Mentoring Award.
A light lunch will be provided.
For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca.
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