Stories of Pain and the Pursuit of Justice: Law, Violence, Experience and Jurisprudence

Abstract

Following Robert Cover's essay on law's “field of pain and death”, Austin Sarat and Thomas Kearns have presented the bases for a “jurisprudence of violence,” part of which requires including experiential accounts of (law's) violence in legal theory. This article explores these writers' understanding of violence, its relationships with law and the relevance of its experiential impact for jurisprudence, before focusing on two methodological issues. First, it argues that discussion of violence needs to be clearly situated and outlines a conceptual map as the basis for further analysis. Second, it questions the concept of experience in this context and addresses some key problems involved in articulating violent experience in textual discourse.