Groups seeking legal equality often take a victory as the end of the line. Once judgment is granted or a law is passed, coalitions disband and life goes on in a new state of equality. Policy makers too may assume that a troublesome file is now closed. This collection arises from the urgent sense that law reforms driven by equality call for fresh lines of inquiry. In unintended ways, reforms may harm their intended beneficiaries. They may also worsen the disadvantage of other groups. Committed to tackling these important issues beyond the boundaries that often confine legal scholarship,...

While there is no shortage of studies addressing the state's regulation of the sexual, research into the ways in which the sexual governs the state and its attributes is still in its infancy. The Sexual Constitution of Political Authority argues that there are good reasons to suppose that our understandings of state power quiver with erotic undercurrents. The book maintains, more specifically, that the relationship between ideas of political authority and male same-sex desire is especially fraught. Through a series of case studies where a statesman's same-sex desire was put...

This book develops a new framework for analyzing the spatio-temporal workings of law and other forms of governance. Chronotopes of Law: Jurisdiction, Scale and Governance argues that studies of law and governance can be reinvigorated by drawing on a bundle of quite heterogenous analytical tools that do not have a single provenance or a single political or normative aim but that work well in combination.

Analyses of legal temporality carried out by anthropologists and studies of law and space undertaken by geographers and legal scholars have proliferated in...

Care is central to life, and yet is all too often undervalued, taken for granted, and hidden from view. This collection of fourteen substantive and highly innovative essays, along with its insightful introduction, seeks to explore the different dimensions of care that shape social, legal and political contexts. It addresses these dimensions in four key ways. First, the contributions expand contemporary theoretical understandings of the value of care, by reflecting upon established conceptual approaches (such as the ethics of care ) and developing new ways of using and understanding this...

This book engages with the traditional questions of legal theory but its analysis rests on the contention that law is not confined to the state. Despite the increasing range of contemporary approaches to law, nearly all legal theory maintains the presumption that the legal is essentially, centrally, or even necessarily state law. Against the backdrop of analytical jurisprudence, the book draws theoretical connections and continuities between different experiences, spheres, and modalities of law and in particular legal pluralism. Taking up the many forms of critical and socio-legal thought,...

A rich collection of interdisciplinary essays, this book explores the question: what is to be found at the intersection of the sensorium and law s empire? Examining the problem of how legal rationalities try to grasp what can only be sensed through the body, these essays problematize the Cartesian framework that has long separated the mind from the body, reason from feeling and the human from the animal. In doing so, they consider how the sensorium can operate, variously, as a tool of power or as a means of countering the exercise of regulatory force. The senses, it is argued, operate as a...