The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. By Colin Dayan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 343 pp. $24.95 paper.

Abstract

The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons. By Colin Dayan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. 343 pp. $24.95 paper.Colin Dayan's The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons is a tour de force of interdisciplinary legal scholar- ship. The book's main objective is, as Dayan puts it, ask how law encapsulates, sustains, and invigorates philosophies of person- hood (p. xii). She approaches this question with sensibilities of a humanist interested in understanding law's negotiations with those at edge of category human-slaves, felons, and animals-and with what she describes as the obscene made lawful: slavery, torture, indefinite solitary confinement, preventive deten- tion (p. xii). Given that focus, book makes a forceful set of moral claims about both injustices done in these legal negotia- tions and, less sanguinely, about their inevitability.At dark heart of this critical genealogy and at center of The Law is a White Dog lies a four-year engagement Dayan under- took with Arizona's prison system: its supermax facilities, its chain gangs, its administrative policies. Witnessing psychological deci- mation of inmates in such a context provokes Dayan into an analy- sis of way Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, particularly Supreme Court's recent interpretations of and unusual, has left behind concerns of effects of incarceration on inmates' souls in attempt to discern and judge officials' states of mind. In those cases, cruel comes to be equated not with a felt sense of pain but with malicious intent. Such an emptying out of inmates' identity in that setting provokes Dayan toward a more general investigation of legal production of negative personhood. Employing an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes constitutive power of legal rhetoric, inevitable persistence of modes of categorizing entities on margins, and magical thinking that conjures and parries otherness when it comes into contact with law, Dayan gives us, through close and careful readings of texts, a history replete with stunningly fresh insights into transformational violence law inflicts and legitimizes on those it regulates and controls.Ghosts run throughout this book: real ghosts in haunted houses, recognized by courts; sacred apparitions like white dog that make strange our presumptions about meaning of identity and threat; ancient legal ideas that haunt contemporary legal logics. Dayan hones in particular on medieval concepts of civil death, corruption of blood, and deodand-a thing without consciousness (whether object or animal) to which evil will is imputed and liability imposed.1 This primitive model of imposing guilt without assessing individual responsibility persists, Dayan argues, in antebellum decisions concerning incapacity of slaves to be choosing agents, in gilded age analogies between animals and racialized others, in Eighth Amendment cases concerning state- imposed violence in prisons, and in U. …