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Abstract.
This review essay responds to Marianne Constable’s book, Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law. The essay and book explore how difficult it is for modern legal discourse to speak of law as something more than social power. Yet, as Constable points out, in the “silences” surrounding legal speech, the lawfulness or justice of law is always called for or presupposed. In this way, justice is inarticulable—like love, it goes between Reason and Power.
Notes
1. W.H. Auden, “Law Like Love,” Selected Poems, Edward Mendelson, ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), p. 89
.2. H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 19-20
.3. Marianne Constable, Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2005), 10
.4. Id.
5. Id.
6. Id., at 13.
7. Id.
8. Id., at 43.
9. Id., at 59.
10. Id., at 85.
11. Id.
12. Id., at 87.
13. Id., at 110.
14. Id., at 131.
15. Id., at 137.
16. Id., at 141.
17. Id., at 143.
18. Id. at 146.
19. Id.
20. Id.
21. Id., at 179.
22. A transcript of the Roberts confirmation hearing is available at http://www.asksam.com/ebooks/JohnRoberts/confirmationhearing.asp.
23. Linda Ross Meyer, “Supreme Difference: Why the Court Still Needs the O’Connor Approach,” Washington Post, July 3, 2005, B1.
24. For the full posting, see http://stonecity.blogspot.com/2005/07/In-praise-of-darkness.html. Posted by blogger Sammler.
25. See Auden, supra note I.
26. Id.
27. Plato, “Symposium,” Michael Joyce, trans., Plato: The Collected Dialogues, Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns, eds. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961)
, p. 526, 202e. Further references will refer only to the 1578 Stephanus edition pagination, which is conventionally used for references to Plato’s text.28. Id.
29. See Plato, supra note 27 at 203a.
30. Id., at 203e. The idea that law is “between” reason and power can also be found in Kant’s Critique of Judgment and in Hannah Arendt’s work. See Linda Meyer, “Between Reason and Power: Experiencing Legal Truth,” 67 University of Cincinnati Law Review 727 (1999)
.31. See Plato, supra note 27 at 207a.
32. Id., at 207e-208a.
33. Id., at 208a-b.
34. Id., at 209b.