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Show 124 Over the years, legal scholars have come to realize that the law is ripe for deconstruction because of its capacity to exclude marginalized, vernacular discourses (Hasian, 2001) and because of its internal contradiction on violence (Benjamin, 1966/2007; Derrida, 1989/2010). Latour, however, would say that more is needed: critics should map the constellation of relations that have helped produce the law as a powerful network of alliances. This is similar to Hasian's consistent argument that we must do more than "trash the law" and realize how to better construct the law by accounting for context, extra-legal affairs, and rhetorical cultures (see Hasian, 1996, Hasian et al., 1996; Hasian & Croasmun, 1996). To supplement Hasian's argument, I recruit ANT to resolve some of the recalcitrance of critical legal studies to reconstruct the law as an assemblage. To better realize this objective, let us briefly review the historical progressions of legal studies, which has evolved from legal formalism, to legal realism, to critical-legal studies. In short, the legal formalists believe that only expert legalists can interpret the law. As Hasian et al. (1996) explain, this perspective is best realized by Justice Antonin Scalia's elitist opinion in Webster v. Reproductive Health Services (1989), where he observed that that "un-elected and life-tenured judges" of the Supreme Court have "undemocratic characteristics" and are obligated to "follow the law despite the popular will - to follow the popular will." Accordingly, the duty of the Supreme Court is to protect the law from potentially raucous public objections because it is believed that law is an absolute science rather than an assemblage sustained by inside and outside networks that sustain its force. After some years of discontent with the formalist's narrow scope of the law, new political thinking emerged from groups such as the legal realists and the New Left |
