Zenotypes: On the Modes of Reproduction of Critical Lawyers

Published date01 September 2002
Date01 September 2002
AuthorPeter Goodrich
DOI10.1177/096466390201100310
Subject MatterArticles
/tmp/tmp-18hPuKFDLo1diR/input ZENOTYPES: ON THE MODES OF
REPRODUCTION OF CRITICAL
LAWYERS
PETER GOODRICH
Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, USA
INTRODUCTION
IMAGES OF LAWis a work of paradoxes. Reading it again, 25 years on,
the paradoxes are starker than before: it is both harder to read and more
obviously prescient of what came in its wake. The book is in tone a work
of the 1960s, or more precisely of the 1960s’ post-ignition that occurred in
the 1970s. It is also in many respects an extraordinarily proleptic study of the
trajectory of radical lawyering and specifically of critical legal studies.
Images of Law is the chronicle of a failure foretold. It offers a map of the
trajectory of what can now be termed the ‘first wave’ of critical legal radi-
calism. It charts in advance the history of a failure, while at the same time
embodying the principal causes of that failure. The claims of critique, as
specified in Images of Law, are striking for their abstraction, their extrem-
ism and their radical disembodiment. The substantive paradoxes of the work
begin with the seemingly contradictory claim that the work offers an anar-
chistic polemic while at the same time claiming to be ‘a dispassionate look at
law from a Marxist point of view’ (p. xi).
The rhetoric of the book is also extreme. It is a work that propounds and
espouses a politics of ‘liberation’. The ‘emasculated’ lawyer will be set free.
The judiciary – ‘the political castrati’ (p. 8) – will be exposed, and debunked.
An escape route from the ‘dehumanization’ of the imperial code of law is
mapped. More than that, a new society is proposed in which the blind will
be helped to see (p. 112), and the ‘masses’ will organize and reclaim their lives,
their freedom, their souls. At the same time, the radical lawyer is portrayed
as structurally incapable of inducing or contributing to any of the proposed
or incited changes. Radical lawyers are depicted incisively as unwitting pawns
of market forces seeking new domains of work in welfare and poverty law.
The radical legal academic is depicted quite presciently as being inherently
SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 0964 6639 (200209) 11:3 Copyright © 2002
SAGE Publications, London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi,
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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 11(3)
constrained to writing in the field of jurisprudence and so to pursuing
abstractions that have neither any impact upon law nor any direct conse-
quence for law teaching.
The paradoxes can be pursued further at the levels of both theory and
political strategy. The political goal of the book is to set up a ‘socialist society’
in which ‘man’ will be able to live ‘a truly human’ life (p. 131). The political
action that the book recommends as the avenue to socialism, however, is that
of ‘ignoring’ both law and the state. Paradoxically, the ideal medium for
ignoring the law is the politicization of the trial and ‘self-actualization’
through resistance to courtroom procedures. The law is to be ‘seized’ by
disrupting the trial, either by dadaistically threatening to urinate on the court,
or by bringing ‘proletarian power’ into the act of resisting the terms of an
alienating language and occlusive rituals. In either case, the most likely
immediate result is summary imprisonment for contempt. Similarly, para-
doxically, the final words of the book take the form of a capitalized injunc-
tion, ‘Seize the time’, and it is now 25 years on, and Zenon at least has spent
almost all of that time writing abstractly, apolitically, in general jurispru-
dence.
Towards the end of Images of Law there is an interesting typographical
slip. The authors write: ‘We begin, thought, with a paradox’ (p. 112). I wish
to take them literally, to read the book thus, and offer an account of the work
that addresses its paradoxes, both then and now. The specific paradox that I
will pursue is that of the image rather than that of law. The book contains
innumerable rhetorical figures, but also a single visual image, one which
achieved a certain notoriety at the time.1 On the inside front cover, already
slightly hidden, is a composite image of a blank white judicial face. Appro-
priately enough, the image that is chosen as the emblem of the work is that
of an erased image, a faceless – as well as castrated – judge, psychoanalyti-
cally an absent father, in dadaist terms tabula rasa, a space for graffiti.
THE DOUBLE READING
Zen Ban´kowski was my supervisor. I realize, of course, that he was only one
of two authors of Images of Law but my images of the work are very much
tied to Zen, to the typescript chapters that he handed me in the first year of
my doctoral thesis, and to his youthful excitement and slightly mad en-
thusiasms. I have never met Geoff Mungham, but I did vaguely perceive him
as a calming influence on the work, as someone learned in sociology and
hence a channel for the autodidactic zeal of a newly appointed legal academic
who wished more than anything else to ignore the law. In this reverie, Geoff
was the dispassionate marxist who advocated organizing the working class
and crushing the bourgeoisie, while Zen was using theory as a species of astral
travel or as the expression of a psychotic episode.2 For Zen, anarchism
was a means of trying to figure out his sense of confusion, his aloneness,
his identity as a radical in a department of jurisprudence run by Neil

GOODRICH: ZENOTYPES
427
MacCormick, the man who had lectured him during his time as an under-
graduate law student at Dundee and had awarded him a first-class degree for
his efforts in analytic jurisprudence. It was also Neil who had seen to his
appointment at Edinburgh.
The initial dimension of a double reading is that of tracing what Pierre
Bourdieu termed lines of power, or fields of force.3 The intellectual trajec-
tory of a scholar is both biographical and social, it has a lineage as well as an
institutional genealogy. Scholarly paradigms, political positions, methodolo-
gies and the objects of study or knowledge all draw upon and react to the
roles and models of teachers, patrons and intellectual paternity or filiation
more broadly. In Zen’s case his relationship to his mentor, patron and Head
of Department was deeply ambivalent. In terms of institutional lineage, he
had to reconcile his radicalism with his debt to a mentor who maintained a
continuing authority over him. His anarchism had to be measured against a
role model who practised a strictly analytic style of legal philosophy. The
radical, the abolitionist, in other words, had daily to contend with quite anti-
thetical rules of judgement; the rebel was still living with his father.
There are certain ironies and details to Ban´kowski’s position that are both
highly specific and idiosyncratic, but I do not believe that the general paradox
of his claim to be an anarchist while also teaching philosophy of law and
being employed by a faculty of law is that unique. The universities have a
history of being ambivalent hosts to non-conformists. Zen’s expression of
that antinomy was in the main elliptical and externalizing. I recollect in
particular a mantra and a related project from the year in which Images was
published. The mantra was borrowed from John Lennon and took the form
of fairly randomly stating that ‘God is a concept by which we measure our
pain’. He was hurting, in other words, but wasn’t working in any direct way
on figuring out why. Nor would I want to suggest that God was a metaphor
for Neil MacCormick, but rather and more simply that Zen’s initiation into
his institutional persona and role left him feeling a pain that the song
condenses into God. The God who measures our pain, in other words, has
many representatives or delegates and so is in effect code for the truth, auth-
ority, certainty and law that Neil among others or most proximately and
ambivalently represented. Zen wanted to feel, to be noticed by or to relate
to, an authority that he defined most personally or directly through his rebel-
lion against its project, its style, its norms, its representatives.
The mantra gained further elliptical expression and meaning in Zen’s
fantasy project of that year, and for all I know, of others too. He kept saying
that he was concerned for the mothers of academics: they had lost their
children to scholarship, their loved ones were snatched into institutions of
learning whose language was incomprehensible, whose capacity to communi-
cate was murdered by the initiate codes of social science. Zen wanted to hold
a conference for the mothers of academics in which mothers could discuss
and bemoan their fate, the loss of their sons.4 His self-conception of the
conference was as a species of support group for mothers but it takes little
expansion of the idea to regard it also as an expression of loss, and of

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SOCIAL & LEGAL STUDIES 11(3)
estrangement from maternity and youth. The conference for mothers was in
this sense a representation of his separation, his unhurried yet troubled
initiation into the institution. That his mother was its emblem suggests both
a residual attachment and also a lost state of the exception, of the feminine
within the academic persona that he was in the process of becoming. The
conference never happened. Zen lived his institutional life in proximity to the
other of his mother. Certainly it was not with his mother that I first encoun-
tered Zen.
When I came to interview for a place on the PhD programme at Edin-
burgh, it was the young lecturer Zen who came out of Professor
MacCormick’s office and led me back in. Neil MacCormick impressed me
hugely by...

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