Emily Grabham: Brewing Legal Times: Things, Form, and the Enactment of Law
| Author | Carol J. Greenhouse |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12038 |
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
Book Reviews
BREWING LEGAL TIMES: THINGS, FORM, AND THE ENACTMENT OF
LAW by EMILY GRABHAM
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2016, 216 pp., $55.00)
Socio-legal studies has made important contributions to the growing
influence of interdisciplinarity in higher education, particularly as the world
of events presents sometimes sharp challenges to settled theory. Such
challenges invite ± or demand ± new knowledge, not only within the ambit of
the sociolegal field but also in the separate disciplines adjacent to it. Since
the middle of the last century, nationalist movements for independence,
demands for civil rights and human rights, transnationalisms of many kinds
as well as the shifting means and ends of security are just some of the
tectonic shifts that have brought law into new disciplinary arrangements
beyond the legal profession itself. Such conversations have led scholars to
reconsider formerly taken-for-granted notions regarding law as the product
and property of states, as guidance for their citizens, or as the presumptive
voice of a cultural mainstream. With those reassessments have come new
research engagements that criss-cross normative, empirical, and interpretive
inquiry.
Such engagements have in turn driven significant remixes of theory and
method across the disciplines. The influence of feminist theory is now
pervasive, for example, and ethnographic method travels widely beyond
anthropology and sociology. The modernist tenets of linear time as the
natural order of things, and law as the social order of things, yield fresh lines
of analysis and critique. Legal analysis extends beyond law conceived as
doctrine, or as a social force, to include the very media by which law is
literally made. Varieties of what has come to be known as `the ontological
turn' ± bringing close attention to the ways human subjects are interrelated
through material objects (for example, laws on paper) ± have revised the
discourse of alterity in the human sciences, as ontology looks beyond
translation of cultural differences to focus on the ways the materiality of
subjects and objects literally makes difference.
Brewing Legal Times weaves a distinctive fabric in this regard ± taking up
temporality, materiality, and alterity as the warp and weft of law. It is a
brilliant theoretical essay, a patient introduction to novel issues of method,
and a deeply moving account of the difference law makes ± in the dual sense
of creating distinctions and contributing to their significance. Anyone
interested in the humanity of law ± whether student, scholar or general reader
± can benefit from the generosity of scholarship and sensibility that Emily
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ß2017 The Author. Journal of Law and Society ß2017 Cardiff University Law School
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