Quod non est in actis non est in mundo: legal words, unspeakability and the same-sex marriage issue

This article centres on the legal recognition of same-sex marriage with a view to exploring the issue of unspeakability; that is, the condition whereby some questions cannot be articulated because of a lack of words. More specifically, the article will explore what happens to those social practices that are not given legal speakability and thereby legal recognition/protection. To this end, I first focus on how words are produced in the sphere of everyday life and their dependence on the existence of a widespread normality. I then discuss how the law sees to the preservation and the reproduction of normality by providing a set of categories which are made available to law-abiders to settle disputes when they arise. In doing so, I elucidate the twofold role played by law as both a selective and a creative device. To cast some light on the particular way law operates, I discuss an important decision by the Italian Constitutional Court in 2010, which provides a telling example of how legal officials are able to seal off the set of legal categories and to leave some issues in the sphere of the unspeakable. I then unearth a paradox: while unspeakability reveals a condition of powerlessness, the acquisition of speakability could bring about even harsher exclusionary effects. I conclude by arguing that the entry into the sphere of official law is always a Janus-faced achievement, but can play as an effective instrument of critique

Social theory and the analysis of transactions

Este artículo analiza una seria objeción a las teorías sociales que apoyan los mecanismos apagados y las fuerzas escondidas que, a su vez, influyen en los actores sociales: ellas destacan la necesidad teórica de confirmar sus presuposiciones tanto si ellas son demostradas como si son desmentidas por los fenómenos en los que ellas mismas se centran. En primer lugar, el autor examina cómo Latour ha puesto en evidencia decididamente este problema. Se trata, pues, de uno de los objetivos polémicos principales de Latour, la teoría social de Bourdieu, para demostrar que, en realidad, Bourdieu compartió las preocupaciones de Latour. Este artículo lleva a cabo este objetivo deteniéndose en la relación entre la noción de rule-following de Wittgenstein y la de habitus de Bourdieu. En la base de este análisis, el autor profundiza el concepto de transactions, que atañe a las interpretaciones discursivas de los actores y al contexto semiótico en los que se insertan. Este análisis finaliza con las consecuencias teóricopolíticas de este tipo de metodología.This article discusses a serious objection to social theories that claim opaque mechanisms and hidden forces operate over social actors’ head: they bespeak the theorists’ need to confirm their presuppositions whether they are proven or disproven by the phenomena they focus on. The author first explores the way in which Latour has convincingly unearthed this problem. He then analyzes one of Latour’s primary polemical targets, Bourdieu’s social theory, to show that in reality Bourdieu shared Latour’s concerns. The article does so by exploring the nexus between Wittgenstein’s notion of rule-following and notion of Bourdieu’s habitus. Based on this analysis, the author elaborates on the concept of “transactions”, which draws attention to both the actors’ discursive performances and the semiotic context where they take place. The article concludes by illustrating the theoretical-political consequences of this methodological commitment

Whither the state? On Santi Romano’s The legal order

This essay foregrounds the relevance of Italian jurist Santi Romano’s theorizing to today’s political and legal debates on the relation between state and non-state laws. As Romano’s classic book L’ordinamento giuridico (1917–1918) has finally been translated into English, the Anglophone readership can take stock of one of the most enlightening contributions to institutional thinking in the last centuries. Romano put forward a theory of legal institutionalism that has legal pluralism as a basic corollary and contended that the legal order is naturally equipped to temper and overcome conflicts between bodies of law. The present contribution argues that this approach unravels the riddles of recent multiculturalist paradigms and provides invaluable insights on the way the state could and should manage the conflicts between competing normative orders that lay claims to legislative and jurisdictional autonomy

What to make of the exception? A three-stage route to Schmitt’s institutionalism

This article traces a developmental trajectory in Schmitt’s conception of law that brings out alternative conceptualizations of the exception. “Transcendence”, “immanence” and “integration” signify three different models to represent the relation between what I call “nomic force” (the particular phenomenon of bringing order) and “materiality” (the matter-offactness of a particular entity or phenomenon). I contend that while Political Theology feeds off a transcendent model, where a sovereign decider makes materiality speakable, The Concept of the Political shows important differences as Schmitt’s argument implies a novel conception of materiality, much indebted to an immanent model. Finally, in the years in which Schmitt embraces an institutional theory of law, between 1928 and 1934, he elaborated on a theory of law pivoted on integration. The chief claim of this article is that Schmitt’s conceptualization of exception and decision is conditional upon the relation between nomic power and materiality that underlies his reflection in these three phases

A sense of self-suspicion: global legal pluralism and the claim to legal authority

Legal pluralism has become common currency in many contemporary debates on law and globalization. Its main claim is that a form of global legal pluralism represents both the most accurate description of law in times of globalization and the best normative option. On the descriptive level, global legal pluralism is considered more reliable than state-based accounts. On the normative level, global legal pluralism is understood as a possibility to open up the legal realm to previously unheard voices. This article assesses these claims against the background of classic legal-pluralist scholarship. After reconstructing the emergence of global legal pluralism and then examining its epistemic and normative versions, the last two sections identify the shortcoming of this approach by underlining the absence of what the authors call ‘a sense of self-suspicion’ in drawing the map of legalities in the global sphere. The main argument put forward is that global legal pluralism is oblivious of a few key insights offered by the founding fathers of classic legal pluralism

Welfare Costs, Long Run Consumption Risk, and a Production Economy.

The main goal of this paper is to measure the welfare costs of business cycles in a production economy in which the representative agent has low risk aversion and - at the same time - the equity premium and the co-movements of aggregate quantities and market returns are comparable to what observed in historical data. In order to do so, I consider a production economy in which the representative agent has Epstein-Zin-Weil(1989) preferences, productivity has a Long Run Risk component and there are capital adjustment costs. In this way, I try to bridge the gap between the current Long Run Risk asset pricing literature, in which quantities are taken as exogenous, and the standard macroeconomic business cycle models. Preliminary results from a benchmark exchange economy suggest that when there is a Long Run Consumption Risk and the representative agent prefers early resolution of uncertainty, the implied total welfare costs of the consumption uncertainty range from 12\% to 20\%. (JEL classification: E20, E32, G12, D81)Production Economy, Long-Run Risk, Asset Pricing,

Queer in the law: critique and postcritique

Since their inception, queer theories have had a remarkable influence on how we think of law’s effects on social reality. In particular, in the past three decades the debates and polemics that have arisen in this burgeoning subject area have shed a critical light on how the law grants social speakability and political agency to forms of sexuality and types of relationships that become ‘respectable’, insofar as they gain access to legal recognition and state protection. As this access comes at a price, queer theorists acknowledge the importance of legal recognition, but are alert to its costs. This is why they have variously explored the tacit dynamics of negotiation and adjustment that this recognition requires. This chapter homes in on such a notable contribution to the analysis of these tacit dynamics. It commences by illustrating the meaning of the queer as a signifier and why it has become such an important field of study. Although reductive, for the sake of clarity I will look at three lines of the queer lineage (to wit, Freudo-Marxism, radical constructivism and antisocial theories) and will briefly foreground how they think of law and its relation to sexuality. I will then focus almost exclusively on the second line insofar as it captures the ambivalence of legal recognition. To cut deeper into this ambivalence, I will touch upon the same sex marriage debate and will dwell on the heated contrapositions that still surround it. This discussion will tease out the fine line between resignification and assimilation; that is, how claims to legal recognition affect the law in a transformative manner and to what extent these very claims are reabsorbed into a constrictive lexicon that effaces the challenging character of same sex sexuality. The chapter will conclude by gesturing to a more recent version of the queer (postcritical queer theory), one that draws significantly from the second line but innovates it in some significant respects

Investor Information, Long-Run Risk, and the Term Structure of Equity

We study the role of information in asset pricing models with long-run cash flow risk. When investors can distinguish short- from long-run consumption risks (full information), the model generates a sizable equity risk premium only if the equity term structure slopes up, contrary to the data. In general, the short- and long-run components are unidentified. We propose a sparsity-based bounded rationality model of long-run risk that is both parsimonious and fully identified from historical data. In contrast to full information, the model generates a sizable market risk premium simultaneously with a downward sloping equity term structure, as in the data.

Prima dell’istituzione: necessità e crisi dello Stato moderno

A fulcro della mia argomentazione starà la tesi secondo cui il prisma esegetico che oppone il pluralismo teorico all’ideologia statalista ignora il risultato principale dello sforzo teorico di Romano. Egli oscilla sì tra l’esaltazione di fonti del diritto diverse da quelle statali e l’insistenza sulla necessità di farle rientrare nell’ambito dell’ordinamento costituzionale. Tuttavia, non si tratta affatto di un attrito, e tantomeno di una contraddizione. Piuttosto, le sue continue oscillazioni sono parte integrante del suo persistente sforzo di identificare un’area all’interno della quale i soggetti giuridici possano negoziare (benché quest’ultimo non sia termine romaniano)

L’anima doppia dell’istituzionalismo giuridico. Carl Schmitt vs. Santi Romano

L’attuale reviviscenza dell’istituzionalismo giuridico di inizio Novecento sembra favorita dalla strana alchimia che segna il panorama della politica contemporanea: lo Stato è tutt’altro che al tramonto, ma le forme di mediazione tra attori sociali e istituzioni politico-rappresentative mostrano segni evidenti di logoramento. Pur con tutti i limiti di un parallelismo astorico, pare che oggi, come a inizio Novecento, non si tratti tanto di metter mano a grandi riforme del complesso istituzionale, quanto di individuare nuove modalità di integrazione delle componenti del sociale. «Il sociale», per l’appunto, non già «la società»: l’istituzionalismo giuridico classico mette in guardia rispetto alla tenuta e quindi all’uso in ambito teorico di macro-concetti, che ad avviso di molti teorici istituzionalisti – su tutti Widar Cesarini Sforza e Karl Llewellyn – reificano e ipostatizzano le entità che pretendono di rappresentare. La società come entità unitaria non esiste. Detto altrimenti, esistono solo attori sociali in continuo movimento, le cui attività di interazione e integrazione danno corpo a contesti associativi e organizzativi più o meno ampi, più o meno consolidati, e comunque strutturalmente dipendenti da quelle attività. Non si dà alcuna collettività onnicomprensiva, bensì un turbinio di attori che danno vita a una fitta rete di scambi dalla natura più o meno durevole. L’associazione è il cuore di una vita sociale ricca di potere giusgenerativo e nient’affatto bisognosa dell’attività demiurgica del potere politico. Ecco, quindi, un primo tratto caratterizzante dell’istituzionalismo: l’associazione, non già l’individuo, è l’unità minima del sociale, e come tale non presuppone l’attività costitutiva di un’autorità centrale