Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelors

Department

Humanities

First Advisor

Flakne, April

Area of Concentration

Philosophy

Abstract

This thesis explores the possibility of justice in the law and does so through a critical and contemporary understanding of American law. Chapter one begins with an examination of critical legal studies (CLS) which, it argues, makes considerable moves toward an understanding of justice but stops short of developing a robust theory. A version of CLS from Marianne Constable is offered as an exemplar and most of the chapter is devoted to a treatment of her book Our word is our bond: how legal speech acts where she asserts the linguistic and rhetorical nature of the law and of justice. Chapter two likewise places a focus on the role of language in the law and in justice. It opens with an address from Jacques Derrida to a conference of critical legal theorists, where he proposes a definition of justice as deconstruction. After a discussion of the implications of such an aporetic justice, the chapter pivots to Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics of otherness. At the heart of his ethics is the infinite responsibility — and response-ability — for an Other which I argue is deconstructive. Chapter three works to show the practical possibility of a justice defined by Derrida and informed by Levinas’ ethics of otherness. It introduces Drucilla Cornell who draws on CLS, deconstruction, and Levinas, as well as critics and skeptics of her work. These critiques raise the fundamental obstacles to CLSand to this thesis in the form of doubts regarding the applicability of a justice as deconstruction and the question of whether the ethics which informs this justice has a place in the law. Finally, it synthesizes Cornell and Constable to answer the interlocutor’s concerns. Constable reminds us that the law participates in language and thus in a shared normative world, but it is only with the addition of Cornell and Levinas that CLS can show exactly what that world demands of us: justice.

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