I recently gave a research seminar at the Flinders Law School at Flinders University in Adelaide where I am a Professor. It was on Law in Theoretical Times – how law, legal education, the legal profession and legal theory will be changed by the post-crash global conditions which I talk about in the book Theoretical Times I am writing partly based on this blog. The seminar discussion was excellent and made me really think hard about the issues raised. I am really grateful to all my colleagues.
Theoretical Times the book starts off with the idea that ‘today is the time for theory’ a phrase which comes from Zizek. ‘I really think we are living in very dangerous, interesting times…Today is the time for theory…There is hard work to be done. It is a unique task’, Slavoj Zizek says in the book length interview Demanding The Impossible which came out in 2013. I asked the critical question in the seminar – how does law, legal theory and legal practice fit into Theoretical Times? Further I asked whether there is a ‘new interdisciplinary legal studies’ to challenge legal formalism? Legal formalism is the idea that the legal rules are the legal rules are the legal rules. A New Interdisciplinary Legal Studies is proclaimed to be abroad by Routledge in their Nomikoi Critical Legal Thinkers book series edited by Peter Goodrich and David Seymour. Myriad books on Law and Legal Theory and their connection to the work of singular theorists are published in the series. They include an amazing forthcoming work on Jacques Ranciere and already published works on Slavoj Zizek, Louis Althusser, Eugenii Pashukanis, Giorgio Agamben, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Judith Butler, Bruno Latour, Niklas Luhmann, Carl Schmitt and Roberto Esposito. The label Nomikoi for the series is striking. Nomikoi is a Greek word used in early law and legal thinking, not meaning advocates or lawyers. In fact Nomikoi referred to an adviser who gave evidence as to the meaning of rules and other writings – an elucidator for judges, especially in cases of ‘conflict of laws’.
But is there, as Routledge and the series editors claim, a new interdisciplinary legal studies and if so how new is it? There have in my view been numerous historical movements for interdisciplinary legal studies, it is just that they were called other things. They were always the ‘Other’ of Legal Formalism. Starting in the 1930s and moving forward to today we can name them: Legal Realism, Law in Context, Law in Books v Law in Action (the Gap Problem), Law in Society, Law and Society, Socio-legal Studies, Sociology of Law, Critical Legal Theory, Feminist Legal Theory, Critical Race Theory and Law, Cultural Studies of Law, Postmodern Legal Theory and Critical Jurisprudence. To some extent or other they are all still around in the contemporary world to make up a ‘new interdisciplinary legal studies’. The difference today is the return to universal concepts in mature systems of singular theoretical work – like Justice in the legal world, Harm in criminology, Deviant Leisure in leisure studies and so on. The mature systems of thought of theorists like Zizek, Badiou, Baudrillard and Virilio are available today to access globally in a way that simply was not the case years ago. For instance, Zizek’s analysis of the new dark ages, Badiou’s notion of communist modernity, Baudrillard’s work on symbolic exchange and integral reality and Virilio’s sense of our move from cosmopolis to claustropolis all give a completely new theoretical backdrop to the new interdisciplinary legal studies. Law is different in and for Theoretical Times.
