The Strange Entanglement of Jurimorphs

Bruno Latour closes out this volume by taking hold of several threads running through the preceding chapters. In addition to responding to a few of the criticisms that have cropped up, Latour offers remarks on the specific analyses developed in several of the chapters in order to shed light on crucial elements of the AIME project and his view of the legal mode of existence, addressing among other things domains, institutions, normativity, jurimorphs and a few modal crossings stimulated by the work of the book’s contributors. The outlines of a new concept – the red letter of the law – even begin to take shape as Latour moves between and among the compelling and original arguments of the individual chapters.

Providing the Missing Link: Law after Latour’s Passage

A decisive philosophical intervention pitched at the level of law’s ontology, Gutwirth’s ‘Providing the Missing Link’ renders the difference between law as an institution or a body of norms and law as a mode of existence or value a crucial point of passage for any future philosophy of law. The first, Gutwirth argues, isn’t really law at all, but a political and organisational phenomenon easily confused with other norms and normative systems, from the rules of sporting groups or trade associations to ethical codes. The second is a far narrower concept keyed to the production of novel solutions under a particular kind of constraint and has nothing to do with the establishment of standards to be followed. Gutwirth’s finely tuned theorisation of law, which resonates with the work of Isabelle Stengers and Gilles Deleuze, sounds a laudable alarum designed to compel legal theorists to disencumber law of the formidable demands of the Rechtsstaat, while holding firmly to the evasive thread of legal enunciation. For Gutwirth, statements in the key of [LAW] require, as an absolute condition, the ‘anticipat[ion of] how and what a judge or court would decide’, and we are all jurists engaged in the practice of law, or at the least, we ‘speak legally’ and not merely ‘about law’, insofar as we projectively reason on the basis of that anticipation. The passage of law depends on this anticipatory structure, from which Gutwirth derives the signal operations of law (qualification, hesitation, imputation and so on), which work in essentially the same way as they did for the Romans. Law alone, he concludes – even after it has been unburdened of the political, economic, moral and other duties recklessly imposed on it – remains ‘the rightful and ultimate provider of stability and security’, as the loops of its unique temporality ensure that a resolution to any controversy can indeed be fashioned, even where every other mode fails.

On Devices and Logics of Legal Sense: Toward Socio-technical Legal Analysis

Kyle McGee argues for the enrichment of socio-legal studies by re-evaluating the operation of rules in legal enunciation, particularly in the ‘judicial Umwelt’. Opposing the tendency to black-box legal rules, prevalent in doctrinal as well as critical or socio-legal research, McGee develops a new articulation of the content of law that would not, in his view, countenance the reduction of law to information. In a departure from his more exploratory book on Latour and legal theory, he focuses here on the means of formal legal speech, walking very slowly, ‘intolerably’ slowly, through the weeds of a US trial court’s opinion in a class lawsuit concerning injuries and property damage suffered by residents of a small community allegedly resulting from a chemical company’s pollution of nearby aquifers. Narrating the slow composition of a legal trajectory out of a multitude of non-legal actors and the court’s methodical de-stratification of complicated levels or planes of enunciation, McGee introduces the jurimorph as a semiotic tool for capturing the peculiar translation that must precede entry into the trajectory and which results in a new legal figure – a value-object or, in later stages, after certain trials have been met, an obligation. The litigants propose competing sequences of value-objects, each leading to the endorsement of their respective positions; the court must submit the virtual sequences to tests, and draws out, actualises, only one pathway of obligations leading to the instauration of a principle.

From the Conseil d’État to Gaia: Bruno Latour on Law, Surfaces and Depth

This chapter artfully scans the surface of La fabrique du droit, ably summarising that book’s arguments and drawing a series of provocative connections to Latour’s subsequent enchantment with that secular figure of the earth, Gaia. Saunders detects in Latour’s ethnography of the French administrative law court a hint of the turn to metaphysics that would come to fruition ten years after the book on law: the conseillors practise a specific kind of hesitation, but perhaps Latour’s point in studying it so closely is rather more general, more speculative, a pluralist’s plea to remain ‘open’ to the variety of experience. The law, Latour argues, must be tracked at the surface, the observer must achieve a superficiality as demanding as that of the law itself – a prospect that presents a considerable challenge to the figure of the ‘philosophically minded’ ethnographer that narrates the book’s asides. Saunders, acknowledging a sort of presentism or lack of historical concern in La fabrique du droit, suggests in an echo of his powerful critique of critical theory in Anti-Lawyers that remaining doggedly irreductionist, at the surface, as Latour advocates, presumes precisely the sort of political-legal stability that a historical investigation would have revealed to be a circumstantial and highly contingent, perhaps comparatively rare, condition. The difficulty of lingering at the surface, however, turns out not to be the difficulty of bypassing history or the orthodox theories of modern law but a fully ontological difficulty: an ‘epochal re-discovery of all that had been excluded – even repressed – by the Moderns’ hegemonic intellectual abstractions’.

Laboratory Life and the Economics of Science in Law

Issuing a bold and, in light of current preoccupations with AIME, untimely call for the continued relevance of Laboratory Life, David Caudill’s chapter realigns the question of Latour’s value for legal theory. Rather than mapping the unstable, unpredictable movements of the legal trajectory – a term that, in preceding chapters, has taken on several perhaps inconsistent layers of meaning – Caudill proposes to reconsider the relationship between law and the sciences (and revisits some of the drama of the Science Wars) under the auspices of the economics of science, a flourishing sub-field of science studies veritably inaugurated by Laboratory Life’s influential discussion of cycles of credit and credibility. Deftly untangling the law-sciences-economics knot, Caudill stages the matter of Philip Mirowski v. Bruno Latour (and Michel Callon), in which the defendants were accused of complicity with neoliberalism and charged, by proxy, with the allegedly pernicious effects of the increasing commercialisation of research on the scientific establishment. Mirowski’s critique runs out of steam, Caudill shows, and runs off the rails as soon as the details of law’s appropriation of scientific research and evidence are examined. But the often dismaying implications of Science Wars-era disputes – now being recapitulated or replayed in miniature, in the economics wing of the science studies field and in legal studies – continue to haunt contemporary law as well as science policy, because it remains unclear to what extent judges and regulators (and legal academics) appreciate the material contributions of works like Laboratory Life to the improvement of our understanding of the sciences, and to what extent the co-production thesis developed by Latour, Callon and others still registers as a fanciful exercise in debunking.

Politics and Law as Latourian Modes of Existence

This chapter presents Graham Harman’s assessment of a vital, highly disputed, frequently perplexing contrast, namely that of the trajectories of political and legal enunciation. With an air of clinical detachment, Harman patiently disentangles the mesh of legal obligations and places this strange, non-referential chain into proximity with the political Circle, drawing on the dichotomy of Power Politics and Truth Politics offered in his recent study of Latour’s political philosophy. According to Harman, politics must precede law because it is the charge of politics to collect groups, which may in turn develop a legal order. Similarly, law relies more or less directly on the existence of political authorities – without politics, in other words, law is mere empty, unenforceable, unreliable words. Concluding with an enticing set of questions about the implications of this arrangement for a Latourian international relations theory, Harman’s chapter skilfully demonstrates the promise and the peril of a comprehensive scheme of modes of existence.

In the Name of the Law: Ventriloquism and Juridical Matters

Cooren here applies his model of ‘ventriloquism’ to law and to the performances of legal speech, which allows him to detect the slight shifts in agency so characteristic of legal argumentation, and which helps reveal the complexity and polyphony of the apparently homophonic judicial utterance. From the Latourian notion of distributed action and the structure of faire faire – a theorem that consistently earns a central place in Latour’s oeuvre, Cooren launches his study by problematising anew canonical givens such as the binaries of passivity/activity and autonomy/heteronomy. We must not forget that ventriloquism involves not only the ventriloquist’s manipulation of the puppet but also the puppet’s manipulation of the ventriloquist, insofar as the latter says things that she, quite frankly, would never say were the puppet not attached to her hand. It is this strange loop of action and passion, autonomy and heteronomy, animation and inanimation, that characterises not only the puppeteer’s performance but also the lawyer’s and the judge’s performances, and, indeed, the structure of communication in general. What, then, does it mean to speak in the name of the law? Without succumbing to the snares of spontaneous hypostatisation, Cooren argues, in contrast to numerous theorists, that the law indeed possesses a sort of agency of its own. A host of legal and non-legal beings (prior judgments, witness testimony, documents of all kinds, emotions like frustration and anger, balances of power, statutes, healthcare reform policies, duplicity, etc.) are figured and mobilised to say certain things in the saying of the law: they are voiced by lawyers and judges, of course, but they also lend their own voices to the latter, shaping the means through which the law may pass.

The Conditions of a Good Judgment: From Law to Internal Affairs Police Investigations

A provocative account of police internal affairs investigations by a leading legal sociologist. Such investigations concern accusations of wrongdoing made by civilians against police officers. By deploying analytical resources drawn from Latour’s work, it becomes quite possible to make such ordinary administrative procedures reveal something essential about the nature of state violence, what counts as legitimate authority, and how law fits into the modern architecture of power. What entities, Moreau de Bellaing asks, must be enlisted, and what relations must be established between them, in order to produce a ‘good judgment’ in these inquiries into alleged police misconduct? Having followed the police investigators in their work for several months, the author is in a position to tell us. Confronting the ‘enigma’ of a severe disproportionateness between the frequency of reports of illegitimate violence and the frequency of the imposition of sanctions for such misconduct, Moreau de Bellaing notes that the compiled data themselves give no hint of the qualitative details of any particular case: as Garfinkel showed long ago, statistical reports reveal, at most, the management techniques of the organisation that prepared the reports. Thus we must plunge into the disciplinary records to extract the phases of investigation and to assemble a logic of the case grounded not in numerical abstractions but in the ‘torturous progression’ of concrete transformations, the interplay of leads, dead ends, ulterior motives, defensive strategies and proliferating uncertainties, and the circulation of value-objects required for the generation of an acceptable conclusion warranting closure of the disciplinary file. Moreau de Bellaing’s conclusion is stark and sobering: the establishment of the legitimacy or illegitimacy of police violence has nothing to do with the magnitude of force applied, as civilians would expect, but only with the successful capture, by the investigators, of the many moving pieces composing the relational situation in which any quantum of force was applied in the first place.

The Life and Deaths of a Dispute: An Inquiry into Matters of Law

Taking up the Latourian challenge of offering an alternative empirical account of what it is, precisely, to ‘do’ law, Niels van Dijk, in ‘The Life and Deaths of a Dispute’, mobilises insights gleaned from ethnographic research conducted at a law firm and courts in Belgium to formulate the legal-theoretical concept of matters of dispute. Tracing the gradual transformation of these matters into legal cases and finally judgments and accomplished facts, van Dijk names each step in the biography of a dispute, sharpening our understanding of the nature of legality along the way. Moving from the development of the dispute through a series of contractions, condensations and extensions to its reduction to contentious points and the judicial linearisation of its complicated folds, van Dijk invents a conceptual topology of law that he calls, suggestively, legal pointillism. Rather than a mere ‘aestheticisation’ of law, this represents a philosophical ungrounding, or re-grounding, of all existing jurisprudence and legal epistemology, stimulating a new look at fundamental concepts (thing, cause, effect, ground, point …) that have been locked for too long in the dusty inventories of metaphysics. Van Dijk claims an affinity not only with Leibniz, Whitehead and Deleuze, but with Harman’s object-oriented philosophy as well. Finally, though his indebtedness to Latour’s ethnography of the Council of State is clear on every page, van Dijk marks a number of differences with him on crucial questions, like the nature of the legal totality and the role of tautology in legal reasoning, arguing that, in the end, it would be better to speak of assignation as a mode rather than law.

Introduction

The Introduction sets forth the general scope of the inquiries to follow. It provides background on the work of Bruno Latour and the relevance of actor-network theory – including but not limited to Latour’s legal ethnography published as The Making of Law – to legal studies in various guises. The Introduction then summarizes each individual chapter, gesturing towards intersections and dialogues the reader may identify as she proceeds through the volume.