Injury and Injustice
The Cultural Politics of Harm and Redress

Explores the inescapable experience of injury and its implications for social inequality in different cultural settings.

Anne Bloom (Edited by), David M. Engel (Edited by), Michael McCann (Edited by)

9781108420242, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 15 March 2018

400 pages, 2 b/w illus.
23.5 x 15.7 x 2.2 cm, 0.77 kg

This book addresses some of the most difficult and important debates over injury and law now taking place in societies around the world. The essays tackle the inescapable experience of injury and its implications for social inequality in different cultural settings. Topics include the tension between physical and reputational injuries, the construction of human injuries versus injuries to non-human life, virtual injuries, the normalization and infliction of injuries on vulnerable victims, the question of reparations for slavery, and the paradoxical degradation of victims through legal actions meant to compensate them for their disabilities. Authors include social theorists, social scientists and legal scholars, and the subject matter extends to the Middle East and Asia, as well as North America.

Part I. Injury and the Construction of Legal Subjects: 1. The meaning of injury: a disability perspective Sagit Mor
2. Injury in the unresponsive state: writing the vulnerable subject into neo-liberal legal culture Martha Fineman
3. One small characteristic: conceptualizing harm to animals and legal personhood Claire Rasmussen
4. Righteous injuries: victim's rights, discretion, and forbearance in Iranian criminal sanctioning Arzoo Osanloo
Part II. Constructing Injury, Imagining Remedies: 5. Chairs, stairs, and automobiles: the cultural construction of injuries and the failed promise of law David Engel
6. Incommensurability and power in constructing the meaning of injury at the medical malpractice disputes Yoshitaka Wada
7. Injury fields Løchlann Jain
8. Good injuries Anne Bloom and Marc Galanter
9. Privacy and the right to one's image: a cultural and legal history Samantha Barbas
Part III. Inequality and/as Injury: 10. Injury inequality Mary Anne Franks
11. The unconscionable impossibility of reparations for slavery
or, why the master's mules will never dismantle the master's house Kimipono David Wenger
12. Inflicting legal injuries: the place of the 'two-finger test' in Indian rape law Pratiksha Baxi
13. The state as victim: ethical politics of injury claims and revenge in international relations Li Chen
14. Law's imperial amnesia: transnational legal redress in East Asia Yukiko Koga
Conclusion Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller.

Subject Areas: Personal injury [LNVJ], Torts / Delicts [LNV], Laws of Specific jurisdictions [LN], Law [L]