The invisible author of legal authority

Law and Critique

Volumn 7, Issue 2, 1996, Pages 173-192

  Conklin, William E ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF WINDSOR   (Canada)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 34247678667     PISSN: 09578536     EISSN: 15728617     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1007/BF01128217     Document Type: Review

References (47)

1. See, for example, the admittedly early writing on feminist legal theory in Ellen C. DuBois et al., "Feminist Discourse, Moral Values, and the Law - A Conversation", Buffalo Law Review 34 (1985), 11-87;
2. Heather Ruth Wishik, "To Question Everything: The Inquiries of Feminist Jurisprudence", Berkeley Women's Law Journal 1 (1985), 64-77;
3. Ann C. Scales, "The Emergence of Feminist Jurisprudence: an Essay", Yale Law Journal 95 (1986), 1373-1403, at 1374-80, 1402-03.
4. Martha Minow has emphasised that this focus on the categorical underlies traditional feminist analysis of difference. See Minow, "The Supreme Court 1986 Term, Foreword: Justice Engendered", Harvard Law Review 101 (1987), 7-95, at 35, 76-78.
5. Male law is projected as a rational set of beliefs or forms in Janet Rifkin, "Toward a Theory of Law and Patriarchy", Harvard Women's Law Journal 3 (1980), 83-95. More, man's view of the world is reduced to man's mind. The role of language is absent in this strain of writing.
6. Margot Stubbs, "Feminism and Legal Positivism", Australian Journal of Legal Studies 3 (1986), 63.
7. See, for example, Peter Gabel, "The Phenomenology of Rights-Consciousness and the Pact of the Withdrawn Selves", Texas Law Review 62 (1984), 1563-99;
8. "Reification in Legal Reasoning", Research in Law and Sociology 3 (1980), 25-51;
9. "Intention and Structure in Contractual Conditions: Outline of a Method for Critical Legal Theory", Minnesota Law Review 61 (1977), 601-43.
10. Duncan Kennedy and Peter Gabel, "Roll Over Beethoven", Stanford Law Review 34 (1986), 1-55.
11. Ibid., at 1. Both Gabel and Kennedy recognized that structural reformulations, in conceptual categories and principles in legal consciousness, posed the obstacle to unalienated conditions.
12. Ibid., at 3.
13. Ibid., at 30.
14. Ibid., at 6.
15. Metaphysics offers "a false form of unity that is imaginary in nature", ibid., at 29.
16. To possess a radical view of how the ruling class "controls the law" is not enough, according to Gabel. This still misses "the essential point - that law is just a form of consciousness, a "belief-cluster'." Ibid., at 31
17. 10 Ibid., at 6.
18. Ibid., at 8.
19. Gabel insists that we can describe "existential reality at the level of reflection". Ibid., at 10.
20. See esp. "The Obliging Shell: An Informal Essay on Formal Equal Opportunity", Michigan Law Review 87 (1991), 2128.
21. Her essay is published in The Alchemy of Race and Rights (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1991), ch.6.
22. Williams, Alchemy, ibid., at 107-08.
23. Just as Fred and Stanford University in general subtly concealed humiliation, even torture, through their "word boxes". Alchemy, ibid., at 110-15.
24. Williams, The Obliging Shell, supra n.13, at 2135.
25. See generally Leonard Krieger, "Authority" in Philip P. Weiner, Dictionary of the History of Ideas: Studies of Selected Pivotal Ideas (N.Y.: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1968, 1973), I.141-62.
26. See William E. Conklin, "The Transformation of Meaning in Modern Legal Discourse: the Canadian Internment Camps", International Journal for the Semiotics of Law IX (1996), forthcoming.
27. Michel Foucault, "What is an Author?", in Paul Rabinow, ed., The Foucault Reader (New York: Pantheon, 1984).
28. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961), 101-103.
29. Ibid., at 107.
30. Ibid, at 94-95, 103.
31. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning, & the New International, trld. Peggy Kamuf with an introduction by Bernd Magnus & Stephen Cullenberg (New York/London: Routledge, 1994).
32. Ibid., at 41-22.
33. Ibid., at 131.
34. Ibid., at 7.
35. Ibid., at 100-01, 134.
36. William E. Conklin, Images of a Constitution (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989, 1994).
37. This is elaborated in Roland Barthes, "Myth Today", in Mythologies (London: Paladin, 1957), 109-59.
38. Also see his "From Work to Text", in Josue U. Harari, Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Sructuralist Criticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1979), 73-81;
39. "Theory of the Text", in Robert Young, ed., Untying the Text: A Post-Structuralist Reader (Boston: Routledge, 1981), 31-47.
40. See generally William E. Conklin, "Teaching Critically in the Modern Legal Genre", Canadian Journal of Law and Society 8/2 (1993), 33-57.
41. Stanley Fish, Doing What Comes Naturally (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 1989).
42. Renata Salecl, The Spoils of Freedom: Psychoanalysis and Feminism after the Fall of Socialism (London & New York: Routledge, 1994).
43. examine the ramifications of Derrida's view of this self-referentiality in William E. Conklin, "The Trace of Legal Idealism in Derrida's Grammatology", in Philosophy and Social Criticism 22/5 (1996), 17-42.
44. As Derrida suggests in his reading of Benjamin's "Critique of Violence", legal discourse, however democratically enacted, is not and cannot be just. Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The 'Mystical' Foundation of Authority", trld. Mary Quaintance, Cardozo Law Review 11 (1990), 919-1045.
45. Supra n.13, ch 6.
46. Kant described the perfectly pure will as divine, "indeed holy" in Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trld. James W. Ellington; (Indianapolis: Hackett Publ. Co., 1981).
47. The externality of the sublime is especially the subject of critique in Hegel Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson (Berkeley/Los Angeles/London: University of California Press, 1988).