Suchergebnisse

In this essay, I pursue the idea of legal judgments as articulations of a (collective) body. I begin by examining the relation between the pleasure principle and the reality principle as a tension within modern legal-constitutional thought; and I discuss one traditional idea of legal sacrifice within those terms: as a suspension or withholding of a sovereign pleasure will in favor of a reality principle. In the second part of the article, I argue that the "pleasure-ego" and the "reality-ego," although in one respect opposites, are, in fact, bound to the same "consumptive" conception of identity, and that against that dynamic of identity-formation stands a very different form of sacrifice, one for which we have too little of a tradition in modern legal thought.

During the past half-century, the United States has declared war on (among else) poverty, cancer, crime, drugs, and terrorism. This essay examines, in the context of these, war as a model for responding to domestic political problems and focuses on the role that that model has played in representing the state and its relation to those evils identified as the enemy.

A review essay on books by (1) Bradley C. S. Watson (Ed), Courts and the Culture Wars (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2002); (2) Keith E. Whittington, Constitutional Interpretation: Textual Meaning, Original Intent, and Judicial Review (Lawrence, KS: U Press Kansas, 1999); (3) Jed Rubenfeld, Freedom and Time: A Theory of Constitutional Self-Government (New Haven, CT: Yale U Press, 2001); & (4) T. R. S. Allan, Constitutional Justice: A Liberal Theory of the Rule of Law (Oxford, UK: Oxford U Press, 2001).

Scholars from a variety of fields, including prominent political and legal theorists, philosophers, and intellectual historians, take up the question of whether democratic politics requires talk about truth, and, if so, how truth should matter to democratic politics