Law, Nation and Race: Exploring Law’s Cultural Power in Delimiting Belonging in English Courtrooms

Published date01 June 2019
AuthorAna Aliverti
DOI10.1177/0964663918776486
Date01 June 2019
Subject MatterArticles
Article
Law, Nation and Race:
Exploring Law’s Cultural
Power in Delimiting
Belonging in English
Courtrooms
Ana Aliverti
University of Warwick, UK
Abstract
This article explores the place of law and legality in the formation of British national
identity and its reproduction (and contestation) inside the courtroom. It draws on
sociolegal scholarship on legal culture, legal consciousness and ‘law and colonialism’ to
shed light on the cultural power of the law to forge national subjectivities. The law does
more than adjudicating justice and imposing sanctions. Its symbolic power lies in its
capacity to construct legal subjectivities, of both individuals and nations. Through the law
and its categories, people make sense of the social world and their position in it. The law
can articulate national identities by expressing who we are and who we would like to be
as a nation. By exploring the place of the law in discourses of British nationhood, this
article contributes to our understanding of the ideological role of the law in reifying racial
and global hierarchies. It also sheds light on how the boundaries of belonging can be
unsettled through law’s power.
Keywords
Civility, criminal courts, empire, foreignness, legal consciousness, legality
Corresponding author:
Ana Aliverti, School of Law, University of Warwick, Gibbet Hill Road, Coventry, CV4 7AL, UK.
Email: a.aliverti@warwick.ac.uk
Social & Legal Studies
2019, Vol. 28(3) 281–302
ªThe Author(s) 2018
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0964663918776486
journals.sagepub.com/home/sls
Introduction
This article explores the place of the law and legality in the formation of British
national identity and its reproduction (and contestation) inside the courtroom. In Brit-
ain, the language and the imagery of the law articulate the character and boundaries of
the nation which in turn are underscored by notions of race, culture, crime and civi-
lization. The relationship between law, race and nationhood has a long history. The
rhetoric of the law served to legitimize colonial expansion and produced enduring
social and global hierarchies based on the standards of the colonizers . As postcolonial
scholars showed, colonial domination left long-lasting mark s not only on the people
and places colonized by European powers but also on the colonizers as they learned the
tropes of mastering others and internalized their sense of superiority (Fanon, 2017
[1986]; Hall, 2002). The most enduring legacy of empire is the ideological apparatus
that continues to shape the self-identity of former colonial powers. Cultural theorist
Gilroy (2004, 164) observed that:
[t]he empires were not simply out there ...in the torrid zones of the world at the other end of
the colonial chain. Imperial mentalities were brought back home long before the immigrants
arrived and altered economic, social, and cultural relations in the core of Europe’s colonial
systems.
In shoring up colonial thinking and mentalities, the law demonstrates its symbolic
power to constitute subjectivities, relations and nations. Indeed, the law is not just a tool
to achieve particular outcomes like reducing crime. Beyond its instrumental, formal
function, the law’s force is predicated upon its capacity to mould social life by creating
a normative order (Ewick and Silbey, 1998; Halliday and Morgan, 2013). Through legal
categories, we give meaning to the raw material of social life and make sense of the
world (Ruskola, 2002, 202; Silbey, 2005, 327). As sociolegal scholars argued (Kurkchi-
yan, 2010; Nelken, 2004), societies construct their own sense of social order and differ in
the centrality they attach to the law in securing that order. Thus, the meaning, content and
roles bestowed to law are contextual and vary from one society to another. In turn, the
national legal culture informs the way people perceive and interact with the law and legal
institutions in their everyday life (Hertogh and Kurkchiyan, 2016; Kubal, 2013).
In this article, I explore law’s constitutive function for delimiting the boundaries of
the nation. In contemporary Britain, the law is evoked in political discourses and in
popular culture to spell out the moral character and limits of the nation. In asserting the
rule of law as a distinctive British value and invoking its standards for stamping out the
‘uncivilized’ behaviour of cultural others, these discourses revive the ideological work of
the law in multicultural Britain (McBarnet, 1981a; Thompson, (2013 [1975])). The
nexus between law, nation and race surfaces inside the criminal courtroom where the
court’s clientele contest their outsider status and claim belonging through the language
of the law. While court operators frame the criminality of some ‘migrant’ groups as a
product of their deficit in rule of law culture, these defendants challenge their character-
ization as unruly and align to social and moral expectations about the ‘good citizen’. In
doing so, they challenge the criminal charges against them and their civic exclusion.
282 Social & Legal Studies 28(3)

To continue reading

Request your trial

VLEX uses login cookies to provide you with a better browsing experience. If you click on 'Accept' or continue browsing this site we consider that you accept our cookie policy. ACCEPT