Dangerous Supplements: Resistance and Renewal in Jurisprudence (Post-Contemporary Interventions) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822311216 ISBN 13: 9780822311218

Publisher: Duke University Press Books, 1991

Synopsis

In Dangerous Supplements expert legal scholars employing a variety of theoretical perspectives—feminism, poststructuralism, semiotics, and Marxism—challenge predominating views in jurisprudence. Prevailing notions of the nature of the law, they argue, have failed to recognize the law’s dependence on social constructs and the indeterminance of language. The contributors further claim that proponents of traditional notions have borrowed knowledge from other fields, only to reject that knowledge as ultimately subversive and dangerous in its ramifications.
Taking as a point of departure H. L. A. Hart’s The Concept of the Law, Peter Fitzgerald shows how Hart adopted Wittgenstein’s linguistic theory to overthrow J. L. Austin’s “simple” conception of rules and habits in law, only to jettison this theory in order to locate the essence of law in its evolution from a “primal scene.” Other chapters examine the way in which the setting of English law above social relations has masked an imperial mission; how the philosophies of Hayek and Marx, as well as the discourses of liberalism, feminism, semiotics, and poststructuralism, have been assiduously marginalized and rendered inessential to jurisprudence.

About this title

About the Author:

Peter Fitzpatrick is based at Birkbeck, University of London.

Review:

"[Fitzpatrick] brought discrete bodies of law together to comment on each other, critique practice from the point of view of theory and theory from practice, as well as force both the local to interrogate the universal and the universal to seek referents in the local."
--Linda Myriades, "College Literature"

About this edition

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0822311216
• ISBN 13: 9780822311218
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224
• Editor: Fitzpatrick Peter