(A) Just Rhetoric?

Abstract

The collected essays in Postmodern Jurisprudence seek to apply postmodernist theories, and in particular deconstruction, to jurisprudence. The book's organising theme is an attack on what the authors describe as law's 'logonomocentrism,' a pun on the deconstructive term 'logocentrism.' 'Logocentrism' refers to the characteristic manoeuvre of philosophical projects that attempt to explain the world, justice or ethical norms in terms of 'concepts claimed to exist in themselves, complete, self-referring and proper' (p 10). These explanatory concepts are presented in opposition to others which, by comparison, are seen as inferior, deviate, peripheral, indirect, distorting or inessential. Thus distinction, the creation of an interior and exterior, or a centre and a periphery, is the characteristic logocentric device. Logocentric projects fail, deconstruction argues, because the concepts used for theoretical explanation always turn out to bear a curious relationship of mutual dependence as well as differentiation from the marginalised, deviate or excluded concepts. The authors' 'logonomocentrism' applies this analysis to law. The legal equivalent of logocentrism is 'the presentation of law as a unified and coherent body' of thought grounded in reason (p 27). However, 'an entity, work or field can claim unity only if it can be clearly delineated from the outside' and '[p]ower is legitimate [only] if it follows the law, nomos and, if nomos follows logos, reason' (pp 26-27). Hence, logonomocentrism is the attempt to view law as a coherent, self-sufficient, unified, ordered body of principles, subject to and justified by reason. The book's major argument is that this picture of law is misleading. It attacks the organic unity of law, law's self-sufficiency and independence from other disciplines, and law's grounding in reason. It claims that law 'cannot be seen any longer as a coherent, closed ensemble of rules or values' (p 27). The authors argue that the law nevertheless attempts to creato the illusion of rational order, self-sufficiency and coherence. It does so by the use of rhetorical and figural language that legal actors and legal theorists refuse to recognise as rhetorical and figural, because this would undermine law's claim to be grounded in reason. Law tries to 'keep out of its empire those other discourses that it has pronounced alien to its scientific or normative closure' (p xi). Law thus spurns mere rhetoric; yet the authors claim that when jurisprudential arguments are studied carefully, they are revealed to depend heavily on rhetorical and figural language. The final chapter of the book, which is nothing short of a tour de force, is as much a symbol of the book's positions as an articulation of them. The authors niingle literary, legal and philosophical themes through an elaborate commentary on Melville's Billy Budd. The commentary is offered in the form of a fictitious law review article whose authors are accused of plagiarism by a former student. This premise allows the authors of Postmodern Jurisprudence to juxtapose the 'article' with a pastiche of interviews, letters and other documents concerning copyright law,