Law's interior : legal and literary constructions of the self
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Law's interior : legal and literary constructions of the self
Cornell University Press, c2001
- : cloth
Available at 16 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
In Law's Interior, Kevin M. Crotty draws on several important literary works to offer a new model of the relationship between citizens and their laws, one that emphasizes the power of law to shape citizens and to foster-or discourage-their autonomy. Crotty maintains that citizens are "inside" the law-they are the law's interior. Literature, he finds, can be relevant to law by emphasizing the connections between law and the world around it-a stance that corrects the tendency of legal theory to treat law as a separate, autonomous entity.The texts Crotty examines-Aeschylus' Oresteia, St. Augustine's Confessions, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens-question the rationalist optimism that Crotty regards as distorting much recent theorizing about law. Further, he asserts that the inability of courts to state clearly the principles animating their decisions demonstrates the stranglehold the positivist model has on us and our legal imaginations.Crotty sketches a model of the relation between citizens and laws that supplements the more familiar idea of law as something deliberated and enacted by rational, inherently autonomous citizens. The most important legal decisions of the past fifty years, Crotty says, rest on the perception that the state, far from merely respecting the "innate" autonomy of its citizens, actively shapes that autonomy. Law's Interior should contribute to a better understanding of the real principles underlying some landmark decisions by the Supreme Court.
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