eBook

Law and democracy in the empire of force

White, James Boyd, Powell, H. Jefferson

2009

Overview

The authors in this book contend that the relation between law and democracy in the United States has deteriorated badly and that these changes are visible in a wide array of legal and governmental phenomena. Evidence can be found in the areas of legal teaching, judicial opinions, legal practice, international relations, legal scholarship, and congressional deliberations. In each of these legal/political/cultural intersections, traditional expectations and behaviors have been transformed or thwarted, and these changes pose a serious threat to law and democracy in our country and in our culture. The editors and the individual authors trace these specific examples of normative decline to \"the empire of force,\" a term borrowed from Simone Weil. The French intellectual applied the term not only to the brute force used by police and soldiers but, more broadly, to the underlying ways of thinking, talking, and imagining that make that sort of force possible, including propaganda, unexamined ideology, sentimental clichés, and politics by buzzwords. Based on the underlying crisis and its causes, the editors and authors of these essays agree that neither law nor democracy can survive where the empire of force dominates. Yet each manages to convey a basis for optimism despite focusing on a specific example of legal, political, or cultural degeneration.

• Publisher: University of Michigan Press
• Subject: Congresses / International / International Relations / LAW / Law -- Congresses / Law -- United States -- Congresses / POLITICAL SCIENCE / United States
• ISBN: 9780472116843, 0472116843