Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places: Justice Beyond and Between

Exploring law's articulation in everything from road signs and billboards to Supreme Court opinions, this volume opens up the possibilities of legal study beyond doctrine and official behavior.This broadly ranging volume shows the possibilities of studying law from many different angles: not only as rule or behavior, but as text, image, or culture, and in relation to religion, place, family, ritual, and performance. For many, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the "wrong places"-sites and spaces where no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law's constraints. InLooking for Law in All the Wrong Places, leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, they show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture. Many contributors examine places where there appears to be no law, fi nding not only refl ections and remains of law but also rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and about law's meaning and function. Other essays look in the more common places- statute books and courtrooms-but from perspectives that are usually presumed to have nothing to say about law. Looking at law sideways, upside-down, or inside-out de-familiarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can gain when law is denied its ostensibly proper domain. Contributors: Kathryn Abrams, Daniel Boyarin, Wendy Brown, Marianne Constable, Samera Esmeir, Daniel Fisher, Sara Ludin, Saba Mahmood, Rebecca McLennan, Ramona Naddaff , Beth Piatote, Sarah Song, Christopher Tomlins, Leti Volpp, Bryan Wagner An impressive line-up of leading scholars from a wide range of disciplines - law, but also anthropology, rhetoric, literature, history, geography, and race and ethnic studies.