Ultimate Legality: Reading the Community of Law
| Author | Tara Mulqueen,Peter Fitzpatrick,Anastasia Tataryn,Abdul Paliwala |
| Published date | 01 September 2020 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/jols.12242 |
| Date | 01 September 2020 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 47, NUMBER 3, SEPTEMBER 2020
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 363–83
Ultimate Legality: Reading the Community of Law
Peter Fitzpatrick,∗as completed by Tara Mulqueen,∗∗
Abdul Paliwala,∗∗ and Anastasia Tatar yn ∗∗∗
This article is a contribution to the occasional series dealing with a
major book that has influenced the author.Previous contributors include
Stewart Macaulay, John Griffith, William Twining, Carol Harlow,
Geoffrey Bindman, Harry Arthurs, André-Jean Arnaud, Alan Hunt,
Michael Adler, Lawrence O. Gostin, John P. Heinz, Roger Brownsword,
Roger Cotterrell, Nicola Lacey, Carol J. Greenhouse, and David
Garland.
An initial twist: several acute observers would consider the way I read
to be the most influential effect of reading on me – a way of reading
that extends beyond the specificity of the text yet, in so doing, connects
integrally with it. Salvation of specificity is at hand, however. That
way of reading is intimately reflective of Derridean deconstruction and
a hugely influential reading becomes his ‘Force of Law’. A problem
ensues. Other influential reading came before my love of Derrida
– influential reading to do with law and society (of course), with
decolonization and imperialism, with engaged anthropology, and with
critical legal studies. A retrospective revelation then follows. Derridean
deconstruction is found to haunt and inform these other readings.
They can be read in a way that inherently anticipates deconstruction.
Some culminating coherence is offered by the inescapable insistence of
community and the mutually intrinsic fusion of community and law.
∗c/o Kent Law School Office, Eliot College Extension, University of Kent,
Canterbury, CT2 7NS, England
∗∗ School of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry, CV4 7AL, England
a.paliwala@warwick.ac.uk
∗∗∗ Department of Sociology and Legal Studies, St. Jerome’s University,
Waterloo, Ontario, N2L 3G3, Canada
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© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University(CU).
A NOTE ON COMPLETION
Peter Fitzpatrick died on 20 May 2020. He completed the first part of
this article before becoming indisposed. Working under Peter’s instructions
and with the kind consent of the editors, we have attempted to provide a
biographical closure based on Peter’s extensive notes and conversations.
We felt it necessary to link Peter’s ‘love of’ Derrida and Foucault, as well
as of Nietzsche, Blanchot, Nancy, and others, as part of his influential
readings. Equally significant is his concern to provide a coherence to
his autobiographical exercise through, ‘implausible as it may sound, the
combining of law and society (of course) engaged anthropology, critical legal
studies, post-structural philosophy, and the culminating coherence provided
by community’ while stressing ‘the formative force of deconstruction’. Peter’s
notion of ‘influential readings’ encompassed not just those that passed his
physical ‘battered book test’ but also the influences that had woven through
his life including those of inspiring teachers, colleagues, and especially his
most valued resource – his wonderful students. Our notes begin after Peter’s
own words in the section on alterity. Tara and Anastasia are two of his former
students. Abdul is a long-term friend who has shared Peter’s journey from
Belfast to Papua New Guinea to his subsequent career in England.
READING
Here and later there is a happy dependence that provides a focal orientation
for this article. The editors of, and several contributors to, Reading Modern
Law have noted that the practice of my reading ranges well beyond the text
in question yet constituently connects that beyond to it.1Aptly, given his
huge ‘influence’ on me, the editors place a generative emphasis on Nietzsche
and his idea of ‘slow reading’.2And that idea informs my own contribution
to the book, ‘Reading Slowly: The Law of Literature and the Literature of
Law’.3Nietzsche would want us ‘to read slowly, deeply, looking cautiously
before and aft, with reservations, with doors left open, with delicate eyes and
fingers’, and in this way to resist ‘an age of “work”, that is to say, of hurry, of
indecent and perspiring haste, which wants to “get everything done” at once’.4
The reading cannot be left in a state of indulgent dissipation, however. While
involving a necessary ‘indecisiveness’, it entails also a determinate resolution,
1 R. Buchanan et al. ‘Introduction’ in Reading Modern Law: Critical Methodologies
and Sovereign Formations, eds. R. Buchanan et al. (2012) 1.
2 Id., p. 1, p. 12.
3 P. Fitzpatrick, ‘Reading Slowly: The Lawof Literature and the Literature of Law’, in
id., pp. 198–199.
4 F.Nietzsche, Daybreak: Thoughts on the Prejudices of Morality, tr. R. J. Hollingdale
(1982) 5.
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© 2020 The Authors. Journal of Law and Society published by John Wiley& Sons Ltd on behalf of Cardiff University (CU).
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