| OCR Text |
Show 123 Although it has been over 20 years since Crafting Equality was published, this author wishes to revisit the concept of equality as it was negotiated during the Reconstruction era in order to critically evaluate the constitutional equalities extended to corporations during the 19th century. While Condit and Lucaites (1993) perform exemplary research on how African Americans attempted to negotiate tensions between equality, property, and liberty with Republican egalitarians and white supremacists, they leave out an entire history about how postwar industrial corporations such as railroads and steel companies were fighting for their own definitions of equality, which necessarily influenced political and legal climates about economic and constitutional equality. To realize how this event happened, we must understand how the force of the law fits into this picture. How should the critic conceptualize rhetoric within the legal arena? The Law Is an Assemblage The law is an assemblage that is capable of producing, sustaining, and articulating actants such as equality. The law is forceful inasmuch as it is made forceful by the objects called into its relations. Because these objects are constantly shaped "by the forces of the outside" rather than "historical, stratified and archaeological" (Deleuze, 1986/2012, p. 87) sociologies, the law is a network that cannot be reduced to a particular sociology of reduction. In other words, the law exists as a force only because it has established many strong relations with nonlegal networks. Like science, the law is not "free of war and politics" (Latour, 1984/1993, p. 5). Although some may believe that the sheer "force of the law" compels rational actors to adhere to its unwavering principles, it is quite evident that the law is an assemblage of relations that is made forceful by the actants that have helped produce its network. |
