Jurisprudent of London: Arts of Association

This essay presents part of a study of the office and persona of the jurisprudent, and in particular, the jurisprudent of London (if such an office exists and if it is not in abeyance).1 Writing in the somewhat neglected traditions of office and training in the conducts of life, draws attention to the dignities, obligations, privileges and rights that are taken up by a jurisprudent when they enter into institutional and public life

The office of the jurisprudent : the status and care of the dying and the dead

University of Technology Sydney. Faculty of Law.The central concern of this thesis is the investigation of a contemporary ethic of the office of the jurisprudent – that is, someone who cares for the conduct of lawful relations or ways of belonging to law. This thesis investigates the ways in which jurisprudents understand their office and the conduct of office and links two questions: ‘How is it possible to die well before the common law?’ and ‘How are the dead placed and cared for before the law?’. It responds to these questions in three ways. First by developing an ethic of office through analysing the competing repertoires, commitments and limits of the conduct of the office of the common law jurisprudent. Second, by analysing the repertoires of legal action in the care of the dying and dead. Third, by evaluating the persona (character) of the jurisprudent. This thesis is presented as a contribution both to the elaboration of an ethic of office of the jurisprudent and to developing forms of rhetorically inflected jurisprudence directed towards the conduct of lawful relations in the dying and the dead

Conditions of Carriage: Finding a Place

This essay considers the persona of the minor jurisprudent through the eyes of jurisprudence and wonders what might happen when the jurisprudent leaves an ‘out of office’ notice on their office door or email. It reports on some elements of jurisprudence as an unofficial training in the conduct of office, considers how a jurisographer might address the writings of jurisprudents, attends to some sites of law and reflects on the ways such attendance is considered a matter of the conduct of lawful relations. Its motivating conceit follows the rarely tested understanding that London bears or carries a jurisprudence

Office and persona of the critical jurist: Peripheral legal thought (Australia)

The challenge raised by the editors of this book and by the work of Duncan Kennedy is to encapsulate something about the contemporariness of contemporary legal thought that is not simply what people – jurists, scholars, and the critical intelligentsia – are doing at the moment. Contributors, it was suggested, might want to look for “signs of the transcendence” of the chaos or at least the lack of form of contemporary legal thought. This chapter annotates some forms of the cultivation and training of the persona and office of the critical jurist (these are all terms that will be elaborated). It notes the ways in which training in the persona of the critical jurist is undertaken through the work of establishing patterns of law and lawful relations (or ways of living with law). To do so, it reports on some of the ways in which critical jurists worry about “signs of transcendence.” The annotations are delivered from Australia. Over the past fifteen years Duncan Kennedy has presented a restatement of his analysis of legal thought and his work as a critical legal scholar. In offering accounts of the globalizations of legal thought, he has presented his work as an analysis of contemporary legal thought, as a resource for the critical intelligentsias of the periphery in their own critical projects, and, it might be imagined, as a practice of (critical legal) freedom. The first part of this chapter addresses Duncan Kennedy’s style and mode of analysis as a form of training in and cultivation of the persona and, with some hesitation, the office, of the critical jurist (as indicated, these terms will receive elaboration). It argues that this training in personality has been globalized along with forms of contemporary and critical legal thought. Alongside Kennedy’s account of the training of the critical jurist, a number of accounts of the cultivation of a persona and office are annotated that might be imagined as part of the task of considering Australia, however partially, as belonging to a lawful rather than a lawless South. This geographic and juridical South is not identical to the political-economic global south, since it addresses the conduct and patterning of lawful relations. It is one way, through laws of nations, to address patterns of globalization of legal thought. This concern with the conduct of lawful relations might be one of the imagined, peripheral, addresses of Kennedy’s more recent work