For more than a century, law schools have trained students to 'think like a lawyer'. In these times of legal crisis, both in legal education and in global society, what does that mean for the rest of us? In this book, thirty leading international scholars - including Louis Assier-Andrieu, Marianne Constable, Yves Dezalay, Denise Ferreira da Silva, Bryant G. Garth, Peter Goodrich, Duncan Kennedy, Martti Koskenniemi, Shaun McVeigh, Samuel Moyn, Annelise Riles, Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon - examine what is distinctive about legal thought. They probe the relation between law and time, law and culture, and legal thought and legal action; the nature of current legal thought; the geography of legal thought; and the conditions for recognition of a new 'contemporary' style of law. This work will help theorists, social scientists, historians and students understand the intellectual context of legal problems, legal doctrine, and jurisprudential trends in the current conjuncture.
Introduction: searching for contemporary legal thought: history, image and structure Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins; Part I. Histories of the Legal Contemporary: 1. Of origin: toward a history of contemporary legal thought Christopher Tomlins; 2. Who are we? Persona, office, suspicion and critique Peter Goodrich; 3. On the hinges of history: for a relational legal historiography Maks Del Mar; 4. Contemporary legal genealogies Ben Golder; 5. Legal theory among the ruins Samuel Moyn; 6. Institutional conditions of contemporary legal thought Paulo Barrozo; 7. 'Legal theory', strategies of learned production, and the relatively weak autonomy of the subfield of learned law Yves Dezalay and Bryant G. Garth; 8. Law and language as information systems: perish the thought! Marianne Constable; 9. Our geological contemporary Alain Pottage; Part II. Images of the Legal Contemporary?: 10. International law as 'global governance' Martti Koskenniemi; 11. Recasting labor standards for the contemporary: international versus transnational frameworks at the ILO Leila Kawar; 12. An effective and affective history of colonial law Judith Surkis; 13. A cultural reluctance to rights Louis Assier-Andrieu; 14. The scene of nature Denise Ferreira da Silva; 15. Registering interests: modern methods of valuing labor, land and life Brenna Bhandar; 16. Market anti-naturalisms Andrew Lang; 17. Neoliberalism and the new international economic order: a history of 'contemporary legal thought' Umut Özsu; 18. ... and law? John Henry Schlegel; Part III: Structures of the Legal Contemporary: 19. A social psychological interpretation of the hermeneutic of suspicion in contemporary American legal thought Duncan Kennedy; 20. Office and persona of the critical jurist: peripheral legal thought (Australia) Shaun McVeigh; 21. Zombie jurisprudence Omri Ben-Zvi; 22. The knowledge bubble: a diagnostic for expertopia Pierre Schlag; 23. ADR and some thoughts on 'the social' in contemporary legal thought Amy J. Cohen; 24. Complexity and reconstruction as contemporary legal thought: law-conflict interactions and judicial work Michal Alberstein; 25. Democratic experimentalism Charles F. Sabel and William H. Simon; 26. Legal amateurism Annelise Riles; 27. After the end of legal thought Justin Desautels-Stein; Afterword; Contemporary legal thought as ... Justin Desautels-Stein and Christopher Tomlins.
