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This paper attempts to examine the underlying structure of analogical reasoning in decision making. The immediate (but not exclusive) context is the form of reasoning commonly seen as prevalent in common-law judicial decision making. Following Wittgenstein and Strawson the paper identifies the problem of the contingency of transitivity ofanalogical relations as a serious impediment to analogical reasoning...
The article illustrates the universal nature of lawby phenomenologically considering some legalcategories: legal subject, legal interpretation, legalmeaning, and third person. The starting-point is theuniversalizing nature of some fundamental rules ofpractical discourse, respectively of legal reasoning.Like universalizability, this is a process that can besemiotically explained. Semiosis itself presupposesmediation;...
In this essay, I apply Jacques Lacan'sfour discourses to the legal profession. A lawyer –i.e. a legal expert – engages in the Master'sdiscourse when he writes the law; he engages in theUniversity discourse when he interprets or attempts tojustify the law. In contrast, an attorney – i.e. a legal advisor – engages in the Analyst'sdiscourse when she counsel's her client; she engagesin the Hysteric's...
This paper argues for the practical importance ofpsychoanalysis for criminology, an importancewhich finds its raison d'être in thenecessity that a subject be response-able for there tobe full legal responsibility. In recognising therequirement for a certain linguistic constellation tobe in evidence – namely that there be a subject ofenunciation who is able to answer for what hearticulates at the level...
This article examines mental health advocacy,exploring the philosophy of the gift and thepsychology of forensic intervention. Byselectively, though strategically, reviewing the workof Hobbes, Emerson, and Nietzsche,we argue that egoism, charity, and pity displace altruistic, selfless gift-giving. To furtherlegitimize our analysis, we consider Derrida's semiotic deconstructionism and Lacan's psychoanalytic...
Legal research is not limited to court decisions andappellate reviews. Since police work determines whichcases enter the justice system, police work,especially street patrol, is essentially theembodiment of criminal law. In this paper, usingconversation transcriptions from police-citizenencounters as my data, and applying Lacan's Theory ofFour Discourses, I examine how subjectivities arerepressed...
This article addresses the architecture of the four Inns of Court inLondon as repositories for the body of law (corpus iuris). Thebuildings are perceived as visual representations of the unwrittenconstitution; evidence that the sign, not the text, remains thepredominant form through which the constitution manifests its content.It is in this context that the self-governing Inns are interpreted asmicrocosms...
This is an essay on what happened during January 2000 on Greenwich peninsula, London. The Millennium Dome in Greenwich, London, is read here as a site of the nomadic law of the labyrinth. At the Dome, a law of hyper-nomadics is emerging. In the Dome – a nomadic home, a temporary home quickly pitched of/for/by nomads – Britishness, I argue, is being seriously played as perpetual de-invention in a labyrinthine...
This article comprises two case studies of a ``problem'' within the Anglo-Welsh legal process of jury trial. In that tradition, the judge not only instructs on the law to be applied by the jury, s/he also ``summarises'' the evidence after counsel have already done so. This summarising is largely unconstrained by appellate control. The ``problem'' that the two cases present is that they were trials...
Using current conservative discourses about the nation state in Australia as an example,the paper notices how the image of the (male-sexed) body is used to enhance theauthority of the same (white ``neutral'' agents of largely foreign capital)against the claims of difference (non-white refugees, women, Aboriginal people).The paper notices that far from protecting minority and difference, as liberalismleads...
A close allegiance to `critique' differentiates critical legal studies from other approaches to law. By focussing on the underlying `grammar' used to animate critical legal thinking, this paper excavates a prevalent – modern, disciplinary – reliance upon judgement against rationally founded criteria. Yet the epistemological horizons that once housed such a critical grammar no longer command the unassailable...
Materials in the field of Law & Literature are explored; in particular,the study of specific popular poetic forms found in the Andalusianfolklore of flamenco, such as prisiones songs (las tonás de carcelerasand coplas de presos). Various appropriate aspects of concern and interest of reformist doctrines and the Positivist school of criminallaw in 19th century Spain are related to criminal policy,...
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