Law,Culture and the Humanities

Dissent is a social act that comes freighted with a cultural and historical logic. It has its own iconography, mythology, and liturgy. The icons of dissent serve as paradigms for those whom they inspire. The myths of dissent offer the faithful reassuring stories of struggle and eventual triumph. The liturgy of dissent, in contrast, provides ritualized texts of remembrance, solace, and defiance. Commitment and community, empathy and identity, solidarity and sacrifice are its central themes. Though the liturgy of dissent bears a strong affinity to what Robert Cover identifies as the “texts of resistance,” the two are not the same. Texts of resistance expound the law by which a dissenting community defines the legitimacy and justice of its struggle. The liturgy of dissent, in contrast, proposes community rather than law. More importantly, the liturgy of dissent is the social mechanism by which a community transmutes suffering and sacrifice into normative triumph and, even, joy. This commentary examines this liturgy from the Book of Jonah through Socrates, Debs, Mandela, and the civil rights movement. Dissent, these paragons teach us, always comes with a heavy price. But their greatest lesson is that true dissenters prove their bona fides in accepting those costs with uncommon grace.

The first part of this commentary argues that because the production of dissent depends on the availability of information, greater attention should focus on government restrictions on access to official information. At no time is this more important than when information is monopolized by the government. If not constrained, government’s monopoly control of information, combined with its incentives to shape support for its policies, may at some times and in some ways reduce dissent. In the second part of the commentary, a cost-benefit approach is proposed to analyze an individual’s incentives to produce speech and is then applied to assess the role social communities play vis-à-vis individual dissent. This analysis underscores the important and complex (sometimes encouraging, sometimes discouraging) role that communities play in the generation of dissent. Our analysis uses economic tools, often accompanied by an antitrust perspective, to better understand the implications of government information control and social pressures upon speech and dissent.

This article questions the conditions in which solidarity is given or withheld in response to expressions of dissent. Drawing on the August 2011 riots in England as an example, the article reflects on why some forms of dissent attract support whereas others do not. The author argues that “unpalatable” forms of dissent, particularly those enacted by groups already constructed as deviant or suspect, are often figured as least deserving of support, even though their actions may arise from the highest needs. The article then considers how these patterns can occur in response to more everyday articulations of dissent, such as those expressed by disenfranchised university students. The article suggests a rethinking of the politics of dissent and the distribution of solidarity in order to address broader patterns of power and dispossession.

How does film capture the zeitgeist of a time of cultural and political conflict? This article investigates the relationship between Hong Kong cinema, identity and dissent in David Lee’s Insanity (2015). Drawing on the notion of cultural schizophrenia as posited by Frederic Jameson and reworked by a number of Hong Kong scholars, it argues that Lee’s film about clinical schizophrenia can be interpreted as a representation of the cultural schizophrenia characteristic of Hong Kong identity at the current time.

Drawing inspiration from Lewis Mumford’s classic analysis of the “technics” of political organization, this article explores ways in which anti-government militias and like-minded groups frame the civic role of dissent in technological terms. For militia activists, guns are tangible artifacts that uniquely align existing social practices with an important historical tradition, enhance agency, and provide interpretive finality, while militias serve to help embed that protection and defense with participation in an organic, empowering community. To members, these participatory technics provide a seemingly democratic counter to the authoritarian logic of the federal government.

This commentary argues that prescriptive immigration scholarship has something to learn from the rise of Donald Trump. The Republican party’s relatively close ideological engagement with the aspirations of its immigration dissenters (white nationalists) has paid political dividends in the long run by allowing the party to capture a passion for immigration issues and marry that atavistic energy to legal know-how. But mainstream Democrats, along with scholars whose immigration reform prescriptions align with that group, reject as fantasy the open-borders demands of its dissenters. Yet fantasy can be made real, or at least spark real political enthusiasm, as Trump illustrates. A deeper engagement with the dreams of open-borders advocates, like the group #Not1More Deportation, could in time prove similarly fruitful and galvanizing for the mainstream immigration left.

Aesthetic theory has the potential to develop a sensorium for the rational and arational forces of law. But the aesthetic knowledge of law is underdeveloped. That is why this article proposes a self-reflective sociological aesthetics of law that is capable of acknowledging human and social forces. The article unfolds its argument in three steps: first, it outlines the main approaches in the field of “law and aesthetics”; second, it connects these approaches in legal aesthetics with sociological and philosophical discussions on aesthetics; and, third, it suggests what distinctive contributions such a connection could make to jurisprudence and legal practice.

This article places the court cases on cancellation of British citizenship in the context of the wider socio-political debates on citizenship. The political context demonstrates several potential arguments linking citizenship with rights which could have informed the court cases. However, an observable trend is that while some of the decisions flag various substantive rights, most fail to expand upon them. A formal, legal approach to determination of foreign nationality laws and statelessness is evident in the cases rather than a discussion of rights and belonging. This illustrates how legal formalism operates to exclude important aspects of the meaning and content of British citizenship. By avoiding close scrutiny of the rights framework in the national security context the current cases support a minimal view of citizenship as loyalty in exchange for protection. This is reminiscent of the concept of subjecthood from the days of Empire. The article argues that intense proportionality review of the differential enjoyment of substantive rights would be far more revealing of the meaning and content of British citizenship.

This article explores the concept of political and legal regimes of touching by analyzing Walt Whitman’s poems that envision a new political order founded on comradeship – a distinct kind of friendship characterized by physical intimacy. Whitman’s “Calamus” poems, I argue, demonstrate that touching is a political act. This study resists treating Whitman anachronistically as a “homosexual” and argues that comradeship as he understands it represents a model of queerness that can challenge the recent anti-social turn in queer theory.