Cultural Studies of Law

Book excerpt: This edited collection is a cultural analysis of how law is shaped into procedure and principle by the conditions of everyday life. Law is constitutive of culture just as culture and cultural analyses shape, resist and interrogate legal regulation, exception and norms. So too does law have a dual capacity in the field of culture: it enables the formation of subjects and of cultural practices, and it constrains those very formations. This book uses the animating critical concerns of Cultural Studies over the last 20 years--that is, the symbolic, material, economic, and political practices and power relations that are inscribed in everyday life--to analyze the assembly of practices, procedures, sites, interactions and agents of law. The chapters in this collection accordingly examine the conditions of law's everyday life, in situations ordinary and extraordinary, to show it in the moment of its working. This book was originally published as a special issue of Cultural Studies.