Law and the Stranger

by Sarat, Austin; Douglas, Lawrence; Umphrey, Martha Merrill

• ISBN13: 9780804771542
• ISBN10: 0804771545
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-07-06
• Publisher: Stanford Law & Politics

Summary

Law calls communities into being and constitutes the "we" it governs. This act of defining produces an outside as well as an inside, a border whose crossing is guarded, maintaining the identity, coherence, and integrity of the space and people within. Those wishing to enter must negotiate a complex terrain of defensive mechanisms, expectations, assumptions, and legal proscriptions. Essentially, law enforces the boundary between inside and outside in both physical and epistemological ways. Law and the Strangerexplores the ways law identifies and responds to strangers within and across borders. It analyzes the ambiguous place strangers occupy in communities not their own and reflects on how dealing with strangers challenges the laws and communities that invite or parry them. As the book reveals, strangers are made through law, rather than born through accidents of geography.

Author Biography

Austin Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is James J. Grosfeld Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Professor of Law, Jurisprudence, and Social Thought at Amherst College.

Table of Contents

Contributors	p. xi
Negotiating (with) Strangers	p. 1
Necessary Strangers: Law's Hospitality in the Age of Transnational Migrancy	p. 21
The Strangers in Ourselves: The Rights of Suspect Citizens in the Age of Terrorism	p. 65
Strangers Within: The Barghouti and the Bishara Criminal Trials	p. 96
Conflict of Law and the Legal Negotiation of Difference	p. 141
Who's the Stranger? Jews, Women, and Bastards in Daniel Deronda	p. 180
Of Stranger Spaces	p. 211
Index	p. 237
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