Searching for Contemporary Legal Thought

What does 'think like a lawyer' mean in times of legal crisis? Thirty leading scholars discuss contemporary legal thought.

Justin Desautels-Stein (Edited by), Christopher Tomlins (Edited by)

9781316605028, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 13 December 2018

593 pages
23 x 15 x 3 cm, 0.8 kg

'This brilliantly conceived collection seeks to explore what is new and distinctive in contemporary legal thought. The authors draw out the complex relations between theory and practice, past and present, faith and suspicion, information and thought, fragmentation and creation, and critique and innovation that are at the heart of contemporary performances of legality. The result is an invitation to take seriously the question of what styles and practices of legal thought might be adequate to this time of crisis in the institutions of law.' Anne Orford, Melbourne Law School

For more than a century, law schools have trained students to 'think like a lawyer'. In these times of legal crisis, both in legal education and in global society, what does that mean for the rest of us? In this book, thirty leading international scholars - including Louis Assier-Andrieu, Marianne Constable, Yves Dezalay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bryant G. Garth, Peter Goodrich, Duncan Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon - examine what is distinctive about legal thought. They probe the relation between law and time, law and culture, and legal thought and legal action; the nature of current legal thought; the geography of legal thought; and the conditions for recognition of a new 'contemporary' style of law. This work will help theorists, social scientists, historians and students understand the intellectual context of legal problems, legal doctrine, and jurisprudential trends in the current conjuncture.

Introduction: searching for contemporary legal thought: history, image and structure Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins
Part I. Histories of the Legal Contemporary: 1. Of origin: toward a history of contemporary legal thought Christopher Tomlins
2. Who are we? Persona, office, suspicion and critique Peter Goodrich
3. On the hinges of history: for a relational legal historiography Maks Del Mar
4. Contemporary legal genealogies Ben Golder
5. Legal theory among the ruins Samuel Moyn
6. Institutional conditions of contemporary legal thought Paulo Barrozo
7. 'Legal theory', strategies of learned production, and the relatively weak autonomy of the subfield of learned law Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth
8. Law and language as information systems: perish the thought! Marianne Constable
9. Our geological contemporary Alain Pottage
Part II. Images of the Legal Contemporary?: 10. International law as 'global governance' Martti Koskenniemi
11. Recasting labor standards for the contemporary: international versus transnational frameworks at the ILO Leila Kawar
12. An effective and affective history of colonial law Judith Surkis
13. A cultural reluctance to rights Louis Assier-Andrieu
14. The scene of nature Denise Ferreira da Silva
15. Registering interests: modern methods of valuing labor, land and life Brenna Bhandar
16. Market anti-naturalisms Andrew Lang
17. Neoliberalism and the new international economic order: a history of 'contemporary legal thought' Umut Özsu
18. … and law? John Henry Schlegel
Part III: Structures of the Legal Contemporary: 19. A social psychological interpretation of the hermeneutic of suspicion in contemporary American legal thought Duncan Kennedy
20. Office and persona of the critical jurist: peripheral legal thought (Australia) Shaun McVeigh
21. Zombie jurisprudence Omri Ben-Zvi
22. The knowledge bubble: a diagnostic for expertopia Pierre Schlag
23. ADR and some thoughts on 'the social' in contemporary legal thought Amy J. Cohen
24. Complexity and reconstruction as contemporary legal thought: law-conflict interactions and judicial work Michal Alberstein
25. Democratic experimentalism Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon
26. Legal amateurism Annelise Riles
27. After the end of legal thought Justin Desautels-Stein
Afterword
Contemporary legal thought as … Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins.

Subject Areas: Jurisprudence & philosophy of law [LAB], Law [L]