Moving Law Otherwise

Session Submission Type: Full Paper Panel

Session Description

This panel trains its attention on the long century of legal aspirations forged in the crucible of emancipation and decolonization, on the one hand, and complicated by the rise of new administrative and carceral technologies, on the other. Theorizing this period (1865 to the present), in all its ambivalence, as a kind of “bad object” of political theory – that is, as an object exemplary largely for the ways it retrenches racial hierarchy – we consider, too, the ways it might still incite a reimagination of the promises of democracy, justice, and repair. The legal problems and concepts that emerged across this period, our papers argue, challenge the discipline to rethink the relationships between law and democracy in terms of the legal subjects and political responsibilities they produce, and also for the ways these subjects and responsibilities might be made anew. We approach the complex inheritance of this past less from the perspective of the law’s constitutive exclusions or by taking stock of the many failed and incomplete political projects that these exclusions have wrought than by exploring the conceptual, historical, literary, and/or activist resources that may move law otherwise; that is, “take hold” of the law and “push the boundaries of how legal doctrine could be written, imagined, and enacted” (Nash 2018, 123).

The resources upon which we draw are capacious by design. Ranging from ancient political theory to literature, administrative archives to case studies, from thinkers of the decolonial moment to contemporary disability activists, our papers mine unexpected sources to sharpen our sense of the possibilities for justice, reparation, and democratic participation. In “Democratic Reparations,” Lawrie Balfour and Jill Frank turn to Aristotle’s conception of reciprocal justice – a practice that they argue “enables a possible going on together” in the long shadow of racial injustice – to tease out practices that would enable this form of justice through close readings of Toni Morrison’s Beloved and contemporary activist struggles. Like Balfour and Frank, Adam Dahl’s “Bringing the People In” finds conceptual resources for a renewed democratic response to racial hierarchy in the colonial context. If Balfour and Frank argue for a radically democratic conception of justice, Dahl suggests that the “Jamesian critique” of the plebiscite mobilizes such a conception towards the ends of “a transnational, de-territorialized popular constituency.” Elena Gambino and Ann Heffernan, for their part, draw on the relationship between legal thinking and administrative history in the Progressive era and the New Deal era, respectively. Using archival sources from Progressive era legal debates over prostitution, mothers’ pensions, and prison administration, Gambino’s “A Perversion Not Commonly Noted” suggests that legal debates over a wide range of deviant sexualities reveals the entanglement of raced, classed, and criminalized legal subjects in ways that not only reverberates in unexpected bureaucratic practices today, but also offers an opportunity to “lesbianize” legal theory towards more intersectionally liberating ends. Similarly, Heffernan’s “Conditions of Citizenship’ takes P.P., et al. v. Compton Unified School District and D.R. et al., v. Michigan Department of Education – both legal cases that highlight the increased risk of physical and intellectual disability at work in environmental and social crises – as its object. Hefernan argues that in the absence of a more robust welfare state, “claiming disability” has become one of the few remaining ways to access the resources, goods, and services necessary for full citizenship, and considers how these cases model an alternative approach to citizenship that disrupts the antinomy between citizenship and dependency. Together, these papers suggest that while the laws “on the books” have indeed been a “bad object,” they also remain a useful site for political theorists as we work towards theorizing what a “renovation and reimagination” of the democratic promise might look like.

Sub Unit

• Division 2: Foundations of Political Theory

Individual Presentations

• Democratic Reparations: Reimagining Reciprocity - Jill Frank, Cornell University; Lawrie Balfour, University of Virginia

• Bringing the People In: CLR James and the Anticolonial Plebiscite - Adam J. Dahl, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

• ‘A Perversion Not Commonly Noted’: An Intersectional Lesbian Legal Theory - Elena Gambino, Rutgers University, New Brunswick

• Conditions of Citizenship: Disability at the End of the Welfare State - Ann Kathleen Heffernan, University of Michigan

Chair

• Elena Gambino Rutgers University, New Brunswick

Discussant

• Deva Woodly Brown University