McGee, Kyle --- "Law in the mirror of critique: a report to an academy" [2019] ELECD 1679; in Christodoulidis, Emilios; Dukes, Ruth; Goldoni, Marco (eds), "Research Handbook on Critical Legal Theory" (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2019) 238

Book Title: Research Handbook on Critical Legal Theory

Editor(s): Christodoulidis, Emilios; Dukes, Ruth; Goldoni, Marco

Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing

Section: Chapter 14

Section Title: Law in the mirror of critique: a report to an academy

Author(s): McGee, Kyle

Number of pages: 21

Abstract/Description:

This chapter addresses the general problem of critique, and of legal critique in particular, in the register of attachments to worlds. It dismisses the notion that legal critique has met its demise but suggests instead that critical legal scholars too often forget that their standards are unstable fabrications constituted by and bound to specific chains of nonlegal associations, that their reports too are local, transient and inexorably subject to the power of their successors, and that critique enjoys no real distance from its objects but rather lives in their midst. If conditions have changed – if the liberal political economy or the modern naturalist cosmology have vanished, if entirely new distributions of agency and sensibility have come into being as a result of technoscientific, aesthetic, political, or other innovations, if the problem of the transcendent Form of Law has given way to a proliferation of fragile jurimorphs – we could be forgiven, it argues, for asking whether existing models of legal critique remain relevant.