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The law in a liberal state is often a violent instrument. So said Robert Cover. Among those communities to which the law has been particular cruel are Native Americans. Indeed, the traditions and practices of Native American tribes have spawned rich and fascinating narratives. Each tribe has created its own “nomos – its own normative universe” – with a distinct set of rules, expectations, and tenets. Even still, the state and federal governments have historically challenged Native American traditions and culture with various legal and judicial policies. Insofar as the state-imposed law is blunt and imprecise, certain Native American narratives are thus threatened. Over the past decade, several judicial cases have highlighted the clash between the state’s imperial authority and Native American narratives. Our chapter explores these court cases with an eye to the inevitable conflicts that emerge when law exists uneasily in a liberal state.

This chapter offers a reading of the inclusion of Susan Glaspell's short story, A Jury of Her Peers, in the casebook, Procedure. What does it mean that the editors turn to a secular, literary narrative to ground a consideration of “The Problem of Judgment?” How should we read the irony of the reading instructions they provide, which reproduce the blindness to form – to the significance of “trifles” – that the text describes? How do we read literature in the context of law? More specifically, what does attention to the form of the story yield for an understanding of legal judgment?

This chapter argues that Albert Camus's post-World War II novella The Fall narrates a bridge of complicity between medicine and law, implicating both professions in the Nazi formulation of race. Rather than reading the work as a broadly construed allegory of the Holocaust, it situates Camus's text within the framework of the Nuremberg trials and their judgment of perpetrators in professional rather than in wide-ranging moral terms. The essay concludes by examining Camus's use of the subjunctive, which posits juridical force as the act of imagining alternatives to the past, and using these alternative scenarios as a basis for judgment.

The Chamberlain murder trial or ‘dingo case’ polarised the Australian community – the miscarriage of justice, the relentless media scrutiny and the mediaeval-style public condemnation of Lindy Chamberlain all exposed the prejudices of mainstream Australia. At the same time, Lindy Chamberlain experienced a groundswell of public support: the case was publicised around the world and generated local protest groups. This paper is concerned with re-thinking the historical effects of that case, and is theoretically informed by contemporary debates on the violence of the law, formations of public culture, and cultural trauma.

Under Anglo-American law, the consent of the masochist furnishes no defense to a charge of assault arising from sadomasochistic sexual practices. Our unwillingness to recognize consent in this context suggests disquiet with the ways in which S/M reflects the operations of law. Although the case law casts the masochist as a victim, other accounts represent masochism as a forceful enactment of submission. Masochism also challenges certain ideals of masculinity central to legal reason. Misgivings about the legitimacy of consent to S/M find a useful analogy in critiques of psychoanalytic treatment that understand consent in that context as irreducibly fraught.

In this chapter, I examine stories that foster care youth tell to legislatures, courts, policymakers, and the public to influence policy decisions. The stories told by these children are analogized to victim truth testimony, analyzed as a therapeutic, procedural, and developmental process, and examined as a catalyst for systemic accountability and change. Youth stories take different forms and appear in different media: testimony in legislatures, courts, research surveys or studies; opinion editorials and interviews in newspapers or blog posts; digital stories on YouTube; and artistic expression. Lawyers often serve as conduits for youth storytelling, translating their clients’ stories to the public. Organized advocacy by youth also informs and animates policy development. One recent example fosters youth organizing to promote “normalcy” in child welfare practices in Florida, and in related federal legislation.

It is widely recognized by scholars that superhero stories tend to glorify vigilante justice; after all, these stories often maintain that extralegal acts of violence are necessary for combatting existential threats to personal and public safety. This scholarly common sense fosters a widespread dismissal of superhero stories as uncomplicated apologia for an authoritarian politics of law and order that is animated by hatred of unpopular people and ideas. However, some prominent contemporary Batman stories, including those told in the graphic novels of Grant Morrison and in the blockbuster movies of Christopher Nolan, are ambivalent: in their portraits of Batman and Joker as dark twins and secret colleagues, these stories both legitimize and challenge the countersubversive politics of American law and order.

According to Harvard historian Crane Brinton, “…a cynical democracy, a democracy whose citizens profess in this world one set of beliefs and live another, is wholly impossible. No such society can long endure anywhere. The tension between the ideal and the real may be resolved in many ways in a healthy society; but it can never be taken as non-existent” (Brinton, 1950, p. 249).

This chapter critically assesses the neoconservative communitarian critique of rights talk and practices in the contemporary United States. We argue that the critics are unconvincing about: (a) the institutional history of civil rights development; (b) the actual character of rights talk and practices in ordinary life; and (c) the allegation that rights talk undermines community, which remains a poorly specified and implicitly inegalitarian standard. Our argument is developed on the basis of sociolegal theory and empirical study over the last several decades.