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Making a Place for Cultural Analyses of Law
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 December 2018
Abstract
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- Commentary
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- Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1992
References
1 17 Law & Soc. Inquiry (1992).Google Scholar
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3 I should state explicitly that Hunt makes no claim to have sufficiently delineated either these concepts or the processes they are meant to name. Thus, he provides a discussion of the notion of structural coupling (at 34–36) to illustrate the ways in which the concept of hegemony needs to be better specified and the constitutive processes delineated. Also, Hunt refers (at 31) to Woodiwiss's notion of transposition as a conceptual advance that helps to describe one of the ways in which law helps to constitute social relations by changing the social positions of objects and thus also channeling or denying access to other social positions and resources.Google Scholar
4 See, e.g., works from the “Birmingham School” of cultural studies: Dick Hebdige, Subculture: The Meaning of Style (London: Methuen, 1979) (“Hebdige, Subculture”); Graeme Turner, British Cultural Studies (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990); Stuart Hall & T. Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals: Youth Subcultures in Post-War Britain 40 (New York: Holmes & Meier Publishers, 1976) (“Hall & Jefferson, Resistance through Rituals”).Google Scholar
5 E.g., Patricia Ewick & Susan S. Silbey, “Conformity, Contestation, and Resistance: An Account of Legal Consciousness,”New Eng. L. Rev. (forthcoming 1992); Kristin Burniller, The Civil Rights Society (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1988); James Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1991); George Lipsitz, Time Passages (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990); Barbara Yngvesson, “Making Law at the Doorway: The Clerk, the Court, and the Construction of Community in a New England Town,” 22 Law & Soc'y Rev. 409 (1988). See also Thomas Cushman, “Glasnost, Perestroika, and the Management of Oppositional Popular Culture in the Contemporary Soviet Union,”Current Perspectives in Social Theory (forthcoming 1992), and id, “Rich Rastas and Communist Rockers: A Comparative Study of the Origin, Diffusion and Defusion of Revolutionary Musical Codes,” 25 J. Popular Culture 17 (1991).Google Scholar
6 This discussion of theoretically informed field studies and cultural analysis borrows from ongoing work in collaboration with Patricia Ewick, “Varieties of Legal Consciousness: The Place of Law in the Lives of Ordinary Americans” (research proposal, September 1991).Google Scholar
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10 Id at 103.Google Scholar
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15 Henry, “Construction and Deconstruction” at 98. Henry is paraphrasing and quoting from David Attenborough, “Animal Language” (BBC, 1982).Google Scholar
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21 Susan S. Silbey & Austin Sarat, “Dispute Processing in Law and Legal Scholarship: From Institutional Critique to a Reconstitution of the Juridical Subject,” 66 Denver L. Rev. 437 (1988).Google Scholar
22 In an important early work, Isaac Balbus, “Commodity Form and Legal Form: An Essay on the Relative Autonomy of Law,” 12 Law & Soc'y Rev. 571 (1977), offers a related analysis in which he contends that the generalized categories of liberal law constitute one of its primary mechanisms of domination. He suggests that the specific form of liberal law reproduces the essential characteristics of capitalism in what he calls the commodity form of law. He suggests that, in both capitalism and liberal law, generalized mediums of signification and exchange (e.g., money, individuals, rights) are used to obscure and distort the variation within those categories. One might consider, generally, the similarity between linguistic coda and legal concepts for obscuring the particularities of their use, as well as mobilizing investment in the categories.Google Scholar
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