The Limits Of Law

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

• ISBN13: 9780804752350
• ISBN10: 0804752354
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-07-12
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

This collection brings together well-established scholars to examine the limits of law, a topic that has been of broad interest since the events of 9/11 and the responses of U.S. law and policy to those events. The limiting conditions explored in this volume include marking law's relationship to acts of terror, states of emergency, gestures of surrender, payments of reparations, offers of amnesty, and invocations of retroactivity. These essays explore how law is challenged, frayed, and constituted out of contact with conditions that lie at the farthest reaches of its empirical and normative force.

Author Biography

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College. Lawrence Douglas is Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought, Amherst College. Martha Merrill Umphrey is Associate Professor of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought, Amherst College. Together, they are also the editors of Law on the Screen (Stanford University Press, 2005).

Table of Contents

Contributors	xi
At the Limits of Law: An Introduction	1	(20)
Lawrence Douglas
Austin Sarat
Martha Merrill Umphrey
Terrorism and the Limits of Law: A View from Transitional Justice	21	(54)
Laura Dickinson
Legalism and Its Discontents: The Case of Reparations for Black Americans	75	(34)
John Torpey
The Dilemma of Legality and the Moral Limits of Law	109	(46)
David Dyzenhaus
The Conditions of Surrender: Reconstituting the Limits at Conflict's End	155	(54)
Robin Wagner-Pacifici
Bound by Law? Alien Rights, Administrative Discretion, and the Politics of Technicality: Lessons from Louis Post and the First Red Scare	209	(37)
Bonnie Honig
At the Mercy Of	246	(63)
Adam Sitze
Index	309