Languages of Law is an original and comprehensive study of the history, symbols and languages of the common law tradition. While the first part of this stimulating contribution to modern legal theory, 'Memory, Precedent and the Writing Systems of Law,' examines the technological, professional and polemical contexts of legal writing as a distinctive system of inscription and documentation, the second part of the text, 'Language, Image, Sign and Common Law' moves from historical to substantive analysis. The final chapters concentrate on the visual legitimacy and symbols of law, and advance an original theory of the acceptance of law as a question of the imagery and aesthetics of legal representation. This is a book for students of legal history, legal system and legal method, jurisprudence and sociology of law, and for students of the history of language.

Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (Law in Context)

Reference

Goodrich, Peter

Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Fred B Rothman & Co

Legal History

Northwestern University Press

Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. Legal Discourse provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and `legalese' more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sign are examined and assessed. In the second part the contemporary disciples of linguistics, discourse analysis and communication studies are brought to bear upon the task of constructing a theory of legal discourse as a linguistics of legal power.

Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis (Language, Discourse, Society)

Politics & Social Sciences

Philosophy

PALGRAVE~MACMILLAN

The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws (Discourses of Law)

Returning to the map of the island of utopia, this book provides a contemporary, inventive, addition to the long history of legal fictions and juristic phantasms. Progressive legal and political thinking has for long lacked a positive, let alone a bold imaginary project, an account of what improved institutions and an ameliorated environment would look like. And where better to start than with the non-laws or imaginary legislations of a realm yet to come. 
The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws is a collection of fictive contributions to the theme of conceiving imaginary laws in the vivid vein of jurisliterary invention. Disparate in style and diverse in genres of writing and performative expression, the celebrated and unknown, venerable and youthful authors write new laws. Thirty-five dissolute scholars, impecunious authors and dyspeptic artists from a variety of fields including law, film, science, history, philosophy, political science, aesthetics, architecture and the classics become, for a brief and inspiring instance, legislators of impossible norms. The collection provides an extra-ordinary range of inspired imaginings of other laws. This momentary community of radial thought conceives of a wild variety of novel critical perspectives. The contributionsaim to inspire reflection on the role of imagination in the study and writing of law. Verse, collage, artworks, short stories, harangues, lists, and other pleas, reports and pronouncements revivify the sense of law as the vehicle of poetic justice and as an art that instructs and constructs life. 
Aimed at an intellectual audience disgruntled with the negativity of critique and the narrowness of the disciplines, this book will appeal especially to theorists, lawyers, scholars and a general public concerned with the future of decaying laws and an increasingly derelict legal system.

Literature & Fiction

Zartaloudis, Thanos

History & Criticism

Routledge

Law in the Courts of Love traces the literary history and diversity of past legal systems. These 'minor jurisprudences' range from the spiritual laws of the courts of conscience to the code and judgements of love handed down by women's courts in medieval France. Professor Goodrich presents the 15th Century Courts of Love in Paris as one instance of an alternative jurisdiction drawn from the diversities of the legal and literary past. Their textual records are correspondingly mixed in genre, being in the form of poems, narratives, plays, treaties and judicial decisions. More broadly, these studies trace certain boundaries of modern law and make up one of many forms of legal knowledge which escape today's vision of a unitary law. The author believes that the unquesionable faith in a unity law and its distance from person and emotion is precisely what makes impossible the attention to the individual that justice ultimately requires. Law in the Courts of Love shows how the historical diversity of forms and procedures of law can competently form the basis for critical revisions of contemporary legal doctrine and professional practice. This book will be of interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of law and literature, critical legal studies and legal history, or anyone wishing to specialise in feminist legal theory.

Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (Politics of Language)

Lex Amicitia draws a long history of the law of friendship - from Aristotle to Derrida - into a contemporary context: scouring the backrooms, bars and ill-lit alcoves, the corridors and side-rooms where the interior engine of institutional decisions operates. The intimate public sphere is fueled by the affects of amity and enmity, identification and rejection, experience and projection in negotiating and deciding the fate of workaday lives. Using the example of law, and specifically of the legal academy in the Anglophone world, this book pieces together the hidden ties and the secret bondings, the erotics and the hostilities that play beneath the surface of public lives. Patiently reconstructing the apparitions of affect and amity as they are glimpsed in marginal moments and off-hours, peripheries and slips, emails and other unintended viscera, the structural role of the laws of friendship, the legal form of compact, concord and contract is reconstructed and expounded.

Lex Amicitia: An Anthropology of the Law of Amity

Law in the Courts of Love traces the literary history and diversity of past legal systems. These minor jurisprudences range from the spiritual laws of the courts of conscience to the code and judgements of love handed down by women's courts in medieval France. Peter Goodrich presents the 15th Century Courts of Love in Paris as one instance of an alternative jurisdiction drawn from the diversities of the legal and literary past. These studies trace certain boundaries of modern law and make up one of many forms of legal knowledge which escape today's vision of unitary law. Law in the Courts of Love shows how the historical diversity of forms and procedures of law can competently form the basis for critical revisions of contemporary legal doctrine and professional practice.

Law in the Courts of Love (The Politics of Language)

Nietzsche and Legal Theory (Discourses of Law)

Nietzsche and Legal Theory is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, criminology, cultural studies, and literary studies) demonstrate and enact the sort of creativity that Nietzsche associated with the "free-spirits" to whom he addressed some of his most significant work.

Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws (Discourses of Law)

Valverde, Mariana

Nietzsche and Legal Theory is an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the very wide range of projects and questions in whose pursuit Nietzsche's work can be useful. From medical ethics to criminology, from the systemic anti-Semitism of legal codes arising in Christian cultures, to the details of intellectual property debates about regulating the use of culturally significant objects, the contributors (from the fields of law, philosophy, criminology, cultural studies, and literary studies) demonstrate and enact the sort of creativity that Nietzsche associated with the "free-spirits" to whom he addressed some of his most significant work.

Oedipus Lex offers an original and evocative reading of legal history and institutional practice in the light of psychoanalysis and aesthetics. It explores the unconscious of law through a wealth of historical and contemporary examples. Peter Goodrich provides an anatomy of law's melancholy and boredom, of addiction to law, of legal repressions, and the aesthetics of jurisprudence. He retraces the genealogy of law and invokes the failures and exclusions—the poets, women, and outsiders—that legal science has left in its wake.Goodrich analyzes the role and power of the image of law and details the history of law's plural jurisdictions and traditions of resistance to law. He explores mechanisms of repression and representation as constituents of modern subjectivity, using long-abandoned medieval texts and early appearances of feminism as resources for the understanding and renewal of legal scholarship. Not simply deconstruction but also reconstruction, this work is keenly attuned to the discontinuties, silences, and gaps in the cultural tradition called law.

Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Rule of Law)

University of California Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goodrich, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Goodrich, Peter

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Goodrich, Peter. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (Law in Context)

Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (Law in Context)

Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis (Language, Discourse, Society)

The Cabinet of Imaginary Laws (Discourses of Law)

Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences (Politics of Language)

Lex Amicitia: An Anthropology of the Law of Amity

Law in the Courts of Love (The Politics of Language)

Nietzsche and Legal Theory: Half-Written Laws (Discourses of Law)

Nietzsche and Legal Theory (Discourses of Law)

Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law (Philosophy, Social Theory, and the Rule of Law)