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This paper provides an engagement with, and highlights the depth of, Peter Fitzpatrick's careful examination of myths that grounded modern law and its colonial instances. That grounding is shown to be premised on a concealment of basic contradictions behind fictions of a unified law, even though it only appears through negations of others. Intersecting patterns of marginalisation are shown to be constitutive of modern and colonial law, so it is not surprising that current protests should address a basic exclusionary racism that Fitzpatrick's work signalled. It concludes with some reflections on what his work might mean for three current debates.

Power, while fundamental to sociality, might be exercised with haphazard ferocity or more judiciously in legally constrained ways. Such constraint requires us first to understand how ruling paradigms work, and the effects of their powers, before entertaining suitable forms of legal limitation. Transposing Kuhn’s famous concept, this paper examines a ruling paradigm of biopolitical sovereignty at the Cape of Good Hope through two examples: the 1891 census’ racialized categorizations of the “population”; and a racialized segregation responding to the 1901 bubonic plague. Prefiguring apartheid, both examples indicate how colonial laws authorized discretionary biopowers and yet exempted themselves from monitoring how officials demarcated and governed racialized population groups. The paper touches on the growing maladroitness of positivist ideas about a sovereign “rule of law” in regulating arbitrary biopolitical forces. It concludes by briefly indicating the promise of legal pluralism and Indigenous legalities to check capricious biopowers while pursuing legitimate life-affirming forces. Le pouvoir, bien que fondamental pour la socialité, peut être exercé avec une férocité aléatoire ou d’une manière plus judicieuse lorsque ledit pouvoir est régulé par des moyens juridiquement limités. Une telle régulation exige toutefois, avant d’envisager des formes appropriées de limitation juridique, que nous comprenions comment fonctionnent les paradigmes dominants et quels sont les effets de leurs pouvoirs. En transposant le célèbre concept de paradigme de Kuhn, cet article examine un paradigme de souveraineté biopolitique au Cap de Bonne-Espérance à travers deux exemples : les catégorisations racialisées de la « population » du recensement de 1891; et une ségrégation racialisée en réponse à la peste bubonique de 1901. Préfigurant l’apartheid, les deux exemples montrent comment les lois coloniales autorisaient des biopouvoirs discrétionnaires et comment ces exemples étaient exemptés de toute mesure de contrôle sur la manière dont les fonctionnaires délimitaient et gouvernaient les groupes de population racialisés. L’article évoque l’incapacité croissante des idées positivistes sur un « État de droit » souverain à réguler les forces biopolitiques arbitraires. Il conclut en indiquant brièvement la promesse qu’offre le pluralisme juridique et les légalités autochtones en matière à la fois du contrôle des biopouvoirs capricieux et de la poursuite des forces légitimes d’affirmation de la vie.

How might one read a collection of transcriptions—such as The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1—that exemplifies how to read other texts deconstructively? In the spirit of Derrida’s text, a response to this question remains radically undecided; however, it certainly does not imply the absence of exegesis through the course of a particular reading. On the contrary, the event of a reading fixes itself out of specific interpretative horizons and traces of past understandings. In what follows, my exegesis is contoured by past readings that have engaged diverse phenomenological and existential perspectives declining commonsense invitations to relay fixed, singular meanings that align with the purportedly real meanings and/or intentions of the author. Following a partial suspension of that familiar angle, I propose an epoche of sorts. Provoked by Derrida’s text, I shall reorder words into new assemblies that appear on the following pages, and that surface from my situated readings of Derrida’s deconstructive renderings of other writings.

The 19th century proved to be an important moment for a discursive capture through which—as Foucault (1995) has famously described—diverse disciplinary powers expanded omnisciently to form modern, “carceral” societies. Included here was a regulatory focus on crime, capturing (identifying) criminals, and correcting them. The following paper examines specifically how Patrick Colquhoun approached such regulation by emphasizing “immoral habits” as a cause of crime that could be regulated, in concert, by civil society and criminal law. He called for the development of effective discipline-based policing to capture and control criminals in civil society, and to enable their subsequent arrogation by criminal law. Alongside Bentham’s panoptic surveillance, Colquhoun’s views on criminal habits called for expanding disciplined criminalization that tied social and legal governance. Two aspects of Colquhoun’s influential ideas are highlighted; namely, the social formation of immoral habits as the cause of crime, and the need for “energetic” systems of policing to embrace habits of criminalization. Together, these approaches to habit fostered massive, costly, and unequal criminal justice institutions that today form tenacious, marginalizing, and unequal relations of captivity. The scope of such enduring captivities might be curtailed by recalling their contingent emergence through historically distant trends, and by questioning their costly collective effects.

This review essay critically engages three socio-legal books directed to the changing bases of criminalization; namely, Lacey (In search of criminal responsibility: ideas, interests, and institutions, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017 ); Farmer (Making the modern criminal law: criminalization and civil order, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016 ); and Norrie, Justice and the slaughter bench: essays on law’s broken dialectic, Routledge, New York, 2016 ). The texts explore how modern (largely English) institutions of criminal law proscribe, assign responsibility and appear through contradictory socio-political ‘constellations’. They variously reference criminal law’s expanding punitiveness as it: embraces revived character-based ways of attributing responsibility via ideas of risk; drifts away from a social function of creating civil order; and, works through a ‘broken dialectic’ that fails to recognize its ethico-political auspices. The ensuing ‘overcriminalization’ is referenced variously, but this review questions a tendency to work off legal lexicons, with consequent limitations placed on the scope of social analysis. Referring to Roman and Cape colonial forms of criminalization, this review highlights processes of accusation that call subjects to account as criminals, thereby signalling an initiating socio-political layer upon which unequal forms of overcriminalization rest.

This review essay critically engages three socio-legal books directed to the changing bases of criminalization; namely, Lacey ( In search of criminal responsibility: ideas, interests, and institutions , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2017 ); Farmer ( Making the modern criminal law: criminalization and civil order , Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2016 ); and Norrie, Justice and the slaughter bench: essays on law’s broken dialectic , Routledge, New York, 2016 ). The texts explore how modern (largely English) institutions of criminal law proscribe, assign responsibility and appear through contradictory socio-political ‘constellations’. They variously reference criminal law’s expanding punitiveness as it: embraces revived character-based ways of attributing responsibility via ideas of risk; drifts away from a social function of creating civil order; and, works through a ‘broken dialectic’ that fails to recognize its ethico-political auspices. The ensuing ‘overcriminalization’ is referenced variously, but this review questions a tendency to work off legal lexicons, with consequent limitations placed on the scope of social analysis. Referring to Roman and Cape colonial forms of criminalization, this review highlights processes of accusation that call subjects to account as criminals, thereby signalling an initiating socio-political layer upon which unequal forms of overcriminalization rest.

After Sovereignty addresses the vexed question of sovereignty in contemporary social, political, and legal theory. The emergence, and now apparent implosion, of international capital exceeding the borders of known political entities, the continued expansion of a potentially endless 'War on Terror', the often predicted, but still uncertain, establishment of either a new international American Empire or a new era of International Law, the proliferation of social and political struggles among stateless refugees, migrant workers, and partial citizens, the resurgence of religion as a dominant source of political identification among people all over the globe - these developments and others have thrown into crisis the modern concept of sovereignty, and the notions of statehood and citizenship that rest upon it. Drawing on classical sources and more contemporary speculations, and developing a range of arguments concerning the possibility of political beginnings in the current moment, the papers collected in After Sovereignty contribute to a renewed interest in the problem of sovereignty in theoretical and political debate. They also provide a multitude of resources for the urgent, if necessarily fractured and diffuse, effort to reconfigure sovereignty today. Whilst it has regularly been suggested that the sovereignty of the nation-state is in crisis, the exact reasons for, and exact implications of, this crisis have rarely been so intensively examined.

In his work on truth telling, avowal and juridical processes, Foucault alerts us to legal ‘apparatuses’ that demand certain ways of speaking the truth and the sorts of subjects these recursively produce. This paper explores the role of truth telling in a specific context; namely, ‘criminal’ accusation as instanced by the agora-like processes that enabled Socrates’ notorious accusation for impiety, his defence and the resultant death sentence. Through this analysis, I seek to highlight elements of truth telling required by accusatorial apparatuses that prefigured criminal justice. By examining selected texts detailing Socrates’ trial, I will indicate several aspects of accusation and an exclusionary political logic to which it has long been attached.