The force of meaning : cultural studies of law

Law has a dual capacity in the field of culture: it enables the formation of subjects and of cultural practices, and it constrains those very formations. The tensions created by that paradox are instrumental in constituting the political field. Cultural Studies of Law move beyond textual analysis by attending to the networks of social practices through which law is constitutive of culture just as culture and cultural analyses shape, resist and interrogate legal regulation, exception and norms. Law is a cultural product, but its operations, venues and discourses are unique, as is its coercive power. We take it as given that the law must act to efface both its own rhetoricity and its interestedness in order to function as law, and in this way stands in awkward relation to culture, and to history. A Cultural Studies of Law is anodyne, therefore, in seeking not just to make the law accountable but to show that law might be taken as the preeminent object of culture - preeminent precisely because of its claims to neutrality and objectivity.