The Internet: Academic Foe or Friend

Many people who regularly look to the internet for answers to their questions are disappointed by the potentially confusing array of information they find there, not to mention its uncertain reliability. Many others, as I point out here, often ignore the internet altogether. For me, as an academic law librarian, this is potentially good news

The Wrongful Rejection of Big Theory (Marxism) by Feminism and Queer Theory: A Brief Debate

Post modern thought has fought meta-narrative into derision. [I]f you lick my nipple, as Michael Warner remarked, the world suddenly seems insignificant, and of course, identity becomes more than a cultural trait. It becomes the performance of desire. It becomes a place of ideological contestation over need, or, in other words, an ideology that demands legitimacy for its desire. However, meta-narratives talk about desire too. For example, Marx talked about the desire caused by the never-ending production of commodities. Thus, if, at first sight, it may seem that identity politics and Marxism have very little in common, that may not be necessarily true. This paper shows that they need each other. On one hand, feminist and queer symbolism need a grand social theory to attract popular support for their concrete demands. On the other hand, Marxism is waiting to be rediscovered

A brief critique of the emaciated state and its reliance on non-governmental organizations to provide social services

When, in January 2006, seven-year-old Nixzmary Brown was tortured and beaten to death, allegedly by her stepfather as her mother ignored her cries for help, every New Yorker looked at the city's Administration for Children's Services for answers. Conversely, I do not recall any discussion about the failure of charities to adequately provide for the city's abused children. Charities, like non-governmental organizations (NGOs), are not expected to be responsible for systemic problems. They are a moral and social bonus, which fill the gap in discrete areas where taxpayers' money is not sufficient. So I may be accused of having a one-track mind, but I cannot seem to escape the following questions: Why do we even talk about providing social services in the twenty-first century? Couldn't we have had this issue resolved by now? Why don't we have a “sophisticated national system of government departments” charged with this task? Most other Western countries have one. Even corporate America would like the government to be in charge of providing social services for its employees. Instead we find ourselves on the cutting-edge of a newly fashionable neo-liberal government that looks as emaciated as a Hollywood diva and as masculine as a New York City cop. This decade-long transformation comes hand-in-hand with a trend of privatization and an increased reliance on the nonprofit sector, both domestically and internationall

The red booklet on feminist equality: Instead of a manifesto

If feminist legal theory were to face its legacy today, it would see that its tremendous value rests in its means more than in its ends. True, it has produced palpable results for its promoters domestically. It satisfied many feminists' discrete incremental requests, from Women's History Month to a limited right to bear or beget. While feminism partially satisfied well-identified gendered demands, it has ignored their “base” or frame. I argue that it has ignored basic calls for social justice. As shown here, how gendered demands are satisfied depends on whether basic demands for food and shelter have even been formulated. Once those basic demands for social justice are part of the public discourse, gendered wants can easily become visible, and be formulated in addition to the basic ones, rather than instead of them. Legal feminism needs to see how those basic demands enable the very existence of gendered demands in the same way “grammatical rules are the indispensable base for our free thought[s]” or our conception about the rule of law is the base for our rights-based system. Absent such basic demands, the gendered ones are castrated of the potential influence they can exercise on all their intended beneficiaries and the society at large

Technology, Alienation, and the Future of Litigation-Based Social Change

This article addresses the apparent inconsistency of the impact technology has on the "rights vocabulary." It theorizes how, in certain circumstances, it erodes this progressive vocabulary by making it and the subsequent judicial litigation superfluous

Popular Culture and Legal Pluralism: Narrative as law. By Wendy A. Adams

Wendy Adams’ book is published in Routledge's “Law, Justice, and Power” series, edited by Austin Sarat. Like Sarat, Adams, who teaches law at McGill University, belongs to the school of "cultural studies of law". Thus, her writing is refreshingly cosmopolitan and interdisciplinary. Her project is to build a “legal narrative,” which is a framework for popular culture as law, where illegal acts could easily become re-imagined in an alternative legality. She argues that “legal texts originating with the state may well be of less significance in creating legal meaning in our lives than the representations of law in popular culture.

Book Review: The Arab Spring: An Essay on Revolution and Constitutionalism. By Antoni Abat i Ninet and Mark Tushnet.

An American audience may not know Professor Ninet, but they surely are aware of Professor Tushnet, who has achieved the distinction of being both on the far left of the legal profession and on its more conservative front. In its earliest inception, Critical Legal Studies (“CLS”), as Gary Minda explains, attempted to recreate a ‘left intelligentsia’ in American law. Except for the legal realists of the thirties and forties, and a handful of sixties Marxists, there has never been a serious ‘leftist’ presence in American legal education. To establish a left intelligentsia in American law one would have to break free from the consensus orientation which has dominated American jurisprudence for this and much of the last century, and in fact of the century before that, too. To do this, CLS had to hold itself out as a ‘radical dissident movement within the legal academy. In the latter part of the twentieth century, Professor Tushnet was one of the CLS founding fathers, right there with Mort Horwitz and Duncan Kennedy. Since its high point, CLS has had many lives, much like South Parks’ Kenny character,1 but by now CLS largely rests in peace. But the conservative side of the American legal academe is flourishing, and Professor Tushnet is also well aware of this. In 2006, he served as co-editor of the Journal of Legal Education, which can only be called a centrist meeting-place

Book Review - Il était une fois… analyse juridique des contes de fées, Marine Ranouil and Nicolas Dissaux, eds. Paris: Dalloz,

Il était une fois… Once Upon a Time, edited by Marine Ranouil and Nicholas Dissaux, inhabits the most tempting theory of Gramscian hegemony: Law codifies the people’s desires, especially those imparted to them through books; through the written word. Reading it brought to mind Bertrand Barère and his explanation of the French Revolution of 1789. Books did it all because they brought enlightenment into all classes of society. This seems pretentious and partially inaccurate. The Revolution was also ignited by filth and hunger, which made the masses part with their innate fear of death and bravely fight for such abstractions as the Rights of Men