Critical temporalities: thinking the event -- Hiroshima temporalities -- Hurricane Katrina bio-temporalities -- Keeping time: the rhythms of work and the arts of resistance -- Fictions of time: necro-biographies.

For the past four decades, Anglo-American legal philosophy has been preoccupied – some might say obsessed – with something called the “Hart-Dworkin” debate. Since the appearance in 1967 of “The Model of Rules I,” Ronald Dworkin’s seminal critique of H.L.A. Hart’s theory of legal positivism, countless books and articles have been written either defending Hart against Dworkin’s objections or defending Dworkin against Hart’s defenders. My purpose in this essay is not to declare an ultimate victor; rather it is to identify (...) precisely the core issue around which the debate is organized. Is the Hart-Dworkin debate, for example, about whether the law contains principles, as well as rules? Or does it concern whether judges have discretion in hard cases? Is it about the proper way to interpret legal texts in the American legal system? Or is it about the very possibility of conceptual jurisprudence? Although trying to capture the essence of a philosophical debate can be tricky, I think that there is an important unity to the Hart-Dworkin debate that can be described in a relatively straightforward manner. I suggest that the debate is organized around one of the most profound issues in the philosophy of law, namely, the relation between legality and morality. Dworkin’s basic strategy throughout the course of the debate has been to argue that, in one form or another, legality is ultimately determined not by social facts alone, but by moral facts as well. This contention directly challenges, and threatens to undermine, the positivist picture about the nature of law, in which legality is never determined by morality, but solely by social practice. As one might expect, the response by Hart and his followers has been to argue that this dependence of legality on morality is either merely apparent or does not, in fact, undermine the social foundations of law. The Hart-Dworkin debate, I also try to show, is not a monolithic entity. In the second half of the paper, I describe how Dworkin modified his critique to circumvent the responses of Hart’s followers, thereby inaugurating a new phase in the debate. Virtually no attention, however, has been paid to this latter challenge, which is especially surprising given that none of the previous positivistic defenses are helpful against it. I then sketch out a possible response positivists might offer to this extremely powerful objection. (shrink)

One of the principal lessons of The Concept of Law is that legal systems are not only comprised of rules, but founded on them as well. As Hart painstakingly showed, we cannot account for the way in which we talk and think about the law - that is, as an institution which persists over time despite turnover of officials, imposes duties and confers powers, enjoys supremacy over other kinds of practices, resolves doubts and disagreements about what is to be done (...) in a community and so on - without supposing that it is at bottom regulated by what he called the secondary rules of recognition, change and adjudication. Given this incontrovertible demonstration that every legal system must contain rules constituting its foundation, it might seem puzzling that many philosophers have contested Hart's view. In particular, they have objected to his claim that every legal system contains a rule of recognition. More surprisingly, these critiques span different jurisprudential schools. Positivists such as Joseph Raz, as well as natural lawyers such as Ronald Dworkin and John Finnis, have been among Hart's most vocal critics. In this essay, I would like to examine the opposition to the rule of recognition. What is objectionable about Hart's doctrine? Why deny that every legal system necessarily contains a rule setting out the criteria of legal validity? And are these objections convincing? Does the rule of recognition actually exist? This essay has five parts. In Part One, I try to state Hart's doctrine of the rule of recognition with some precision. As we will see, this task is not simple, insofar as Hart's position on this crucial topic is often frustratingly unclear. I also explore in this part whether the United States Constitution, or any of its provisions, can be considered the Hartian rule of recognition for the United States legal system. In Part Two, I attempt to detail the many roles that the rule of recognition plays within Hart's theory of law. In addition to the function that Hart explicitly assigned to it, namely, the resolution of normative uncertainty within a community, I argue that the rule of recognition, and the secondary rules more generally, also account for the law's dexterity, efficiency, normativity, continuity, persistence, supremacy, independence, identity, validity, content and existence. In Part Three, I examine three important challenges to Hart's doctrine of the rule of recognition. They are: 1) Hart's rule of recognition is under- and over-inclusive; 2) Hart cannot explain how social practices are capable of generating rules that confer powers and impose duties and hence cannot account for the normativity of law; 3) Hart cannot explain how disagreements about the criteria of legal validity that occur within actual legal systems, such as in American law, are possible. In Parts Four and Five, I address these various objections. I argue that although Hart's particular account of the rule of recognition is flawed and should be rejected, a related notion can be fashioned and should be substituted in its place. The idea, roughly, is to treat the rule of recognition as a shared plan which sets out the constitutional order of a legal system. As I try to show, understanding the rule of recognition in this new way allows the legal positivist to overcome the challenges lodged against Hart's version while still retaining the power of the original idea. (shrink)

Lays out basics of planning theory of law. Roughly, characterizes the internal point of view as a complex planning intention rather than a response to a recurring coordination problem. We are not responding to such a problem per se, but rather to a cooperation problem - and thus the structure of the attitude or intention must be different. It is officials who have the relevant attitude. Does not reject conventionalism, but argues that the convention is of a different sort than (...) is typically thought. Considers the basic commitment of legal positivism to be a commitment law as social fact. (shrink)

This essay argues that techniques for assessing testimonial credibility were well established in English legal contexts before they appeared in English natural philosophy. ‘Matters of fact’ supported by testimony referred to human actions and events before the concept was applied to natural phenomena. The article surveys English legal views about testimony and argues that the criteria for credible testimony in both legal and scientific venues were not limited to those of gentle status. Natural philosophers became concerned with testimony when they (...) shifted their attention from universal statements about nature to particular natural and experimental events. Testimony thus became important in the construction of natural and experimental histories constructed by English naturalists. The shift to a more Baconian approach to natural investigation, itself shaped in part by legal concepts and practice, made it possible for members of the Royal Society to adopt an already familiar and societally approved approach to testimony. However, the essay also suggests how the use of scientific instruments and the desire to avoid the adversarial processes of the law modified legal conditions for fact determination, and made it possible for later generations to associate the concept of fact, supported by credible testimony, with the natural rather than the human sciences.Author Keywords: Natural history; Natural philosophy; Testimony; Credibility; Science and law. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a new argument against inclusive legal positivism. As I show, any theory which permits morality to be a condition on legality cannot account for a core feature of legal activity, namely, that it is an activity of social planning. If the aim of a legal institution is to guide the conduct of the community through plans, it would be self-defeating if the existence of these plans could only be determined through deliberation on the merits. I (...) also argue that, insofar as inclusive legal positivism was developed as a response to Ronald Dworkin's critique of H. L. A. Hart's theory of law, it was founded on a mistake. For once we appreciate the role that planning plays in legal regulation, we will see that Dworkin's objection is based on a flawed conception of legal obligations and rights and hence does not present an objection that inclusive legal positivists were required to answer. (shrink)

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial with?literary justice?: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and archival (...) documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiro?s War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of?responsibility? in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science. (shrink)

As is made evident in Rosalyn Deutsche’s recent book, Hiroshima After Iraq, Hiroshima keeps returning through the way diverse artistic genres evoke parallels between the bombing of Hiroshima and subsequent atrocities. After contrasting US and Japanese perspectives on the event of the bombing and drawing on Walter Benjamin’s concept of temporal plasticity, this essay ponders the future anterior of Hiroshima, its continuous will-have-beens, as new films and re-analyses of older ones continue to restage its significance.

In Cinematic Political Thought , Michael J. Shapiro investigates aspects of contemporary politics and articulates a critical philosophical perspective with politically disposed treatments of contemporary cinema. Reading such films as Hoop Dreams, Lone Star, Father of the Bride II and To Live and Die in LA through the lens of Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault and Lyotard, Shapiro demonstrates what it can mean to think the political both in terms of cinema studies and in wider aesthetic and social contexts. Cinematic Political Thought (...) is a polemical work, aimed at encouraging critical, ethical and political thinking. Its breadth of theoretical scope and empirical reference, and the innovative style of presentation will make it vital reading for anyone with an interest in the conjunction of culture and politics. (shrink)

This innovative volume, by Michael Shapiro, is not about Adam Smith in the sense in which 'about' is usually understood, for it is neither a comprehensive explication of his views nor a careful tracing of the sources of them. Instead it is a confrontation. This is a book about modernity whose vehicle is a reading of Adam Smith—it is an enactment of the convention that despite the contribution Smith made to creating and legitimating the conceptual space for modern, commercial, liberal, (...) and democratic society, his views are inadequate for those who want an effective, politicized understanding of the present. Shapiro's ultimate goal in this examination is to 'exemplify a way of doing political theory—one that challenges some traditional ways of constructing and celebrating the 'political theory cannon.'. (shrink)

In The Phenomenology of Religious Belief, the renowned philosopher Michael J. Shapiro investigates how art - and in particular literature and film - can impact upon both traditional interpretations and critical studies of religious beliefs and experiences. In doing so, he examines the work of prolific and award-winning writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Robert Coover. By placing their work in conjunction with critical analyses of media by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini and (...) combining it with the work of groundbreaking thinkers such as George Canguilhem, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Shapiro takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to the question of how life should be lived. His assessment of phenomenological subjectivity also leads him to question the nature of political theology and extend the criticism of Pauline theology. (shrink)

Legal positivism is generally characterized by its commitment to two theses Separability Thesis,” denies any necessary connection between morality and legality. Legal positivists do not require that a norm possess any desirable, or lack any undesirable, moral attributes in order to count as law.

This article treats the ideational process that turns men into warring bodies. Beginning with a gloss on Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace, where he expresses optimism about the peace-fostering potential of publicity, the analysis notes Kant’s neglect of what Michel Foucault calls ‘the coercive structure of the signifier’ and goes on to a reading of Michael Cimono’s film The Deer Hunter, which focuses on the discursive frailties that grease the skids for youth to slide from child-like innocence to nationalist-macho violence. The (...) Deer Hunter, which provides an elaborate treatment of the transition from working to warring bodies, features a group of young men whose lack of a discursive rapport with themselves – much less with each other – makes them susceptible to becoming ‘warriors’, sent out to an exotic venue in order to ‘proudly serve their country’ (as the MC directing the wedding festivities in the first half of the film puts it). Contrasting the thought world of the characters in The Deer Hunter with more discursively complex models of thought, the article ends with a speculation on the importance of genre disruption, and the scrambling of codes as antidotes to the linguistic claustrophobia that often attends unreflective transitions from citizen subjects to warring bodies. (shrink)

What do we know about war crimes and justice? What are the discursive practices through which the dominant images of war crimes, atrocity and justice are understood? In this wide ranging text, Michael J. Shapiro contrasts the justice-related imagery of the war crimes trial with literary justice: representations in literature, film, and biographical testimony, raising questions about atrocities and justice that juridical proceedings exclude. By engaging with the ambiguities exposed by the artistic and experiential genres, reading them alongside policy and (...) archival documentation and critical theoretical discourses, Shapiros War Crimes, Atrocity, and Justice challenges traditional notions of responsibility in juridical settings. His comparative readings instead encourage a focus on the conditions of possibility for war crimes as they arise from the actions of states, non-state agencies and individuals involved in arms trading, peace keeping, sex trafficking, and law enforcement and adjudication. Theory springs to life as Shapiro draws on examples from legal discourse, literature, media, film, and television, to build a nuanced picture of politics and the problem of justice. It will be of great interest to students of film and media, literature, cultural studies, contemporary philosophy and political science. (shrink)

It is hard to think of a more banal statement one could make about the law than to say that it necessarily claims legal authority to govern conduct. What, after all, is a legal institution if not an entity that purports to have the legal power to create rules, confer rights, and impose obligations? Whether legal institutions necessarily claim the moral authority to exercise their legal powers is another question entirely. Some legal theorists have thought that they do—others have not (...) been so sure. But no one has ever denied that the law holds itself out as having the legal authority to tell us what we may or may not do. (shrink)

In this book, Michael J. Shapiro stages a series of pedagogical encounters between political theory, represented as a compositional challenge, and cinematic texts, emphasizing how to achieve an effective research paper/essay by heeding the compositional strategies of films. The text's distinctiveness is its focus on the intermediation between two textual genres. It is aimed at providing both a conceptual introduction to the politics of aesthetics and a guide to writing strategies. In its illustrations of encounters between political theory and cinema, (...) the book's critical edge is its emphasis on how to intervene in cinematic texts with innovative conceptual frames in ways that challenge dominant understandings of life worlds. The Cinematic Political is designed as a teaching resource that introduces students to the relationship between film form and political thinking. With diverse illustrative investigations, the book instructs students on how to watch films with an eye toward writing a research paper in which a film constitutes the textual vehicle for political theorizing. (shrink)

It is hard to think of a more banal statement one could make about the law than to say that it necessarily claims legal authority to govern conduct. What, after all, is a legal institution if not an entity that purports to have the legal power to create rules, confer rights, and impose obligations? Whether legal institutions necessarily claim themoralauthority to exercise their legal powers is another question entirely. Some legal theorists have thought that they do—others have not been so (...) sure. But no one has ever denied (how could they?) that the law holds itself out as having thelegalauthority to tell us what we may or may not do. (shrink)

In this essay I stage an encounter between Hobbes’s Leviathan and two versions of the “The Werckmeister Harmonies”. The story contains a number of Hobbes icons, for example, an enormous stuffed whale and a “Prince,” both of which arrive with a circus that comes to a Hungarian town and precipitates fear and chaos. I argue that the story thinks both with and against Hobbes, enabled by Hobbes’s aesthetic style while at the same time challenging the historical prescience of his political (...) philosophy. Sorting the diverse ontologies of the story’s main characters helps us better appreciate Hobbes as a writer and distance ourselves from Hobbes’s solution to political disorder. (shrink)

Writing Politics is a methods book designed to instruct on politically focused literary inquiry. Exploring the political sensibilities that arise from the way literary fiction re-textualizes historical periods and events, the book features a series of violence-themed inquiries that emphasize forms of writing as the vehicles for politically attuned historiography. Each investigation treats the way the literary genre, within historiographic metafiction, enables political inquiry. It's a form of writing that inter-articulates history and fiction to rework a textual past and unsettle (...) dominant understandings of events and situations. Central to the diverse chapters are fictional treatments of authoritarian, fascist, or zealous mentalities. Featured, for example, are Radovan Karadzic, Reinhard Heydrich, and the Trotsky assassin Ramon Mercader. Michael J. Shapiro has produced another original and sophisticated bookshelf staple; the only contemporary investigation in Political Studies that instructs on method in this way. (shrink)

Regulation of the cytoplasmic stability of mRNAs has recetly been identified as a major control mechanism which governs mRNA levels in a variety of eukaryotic systems. In this review we discuss what is known about several experimental systems that exhibit regulated mRNA stability, describe the mechanisms that cells may use to achieve control of mRNA degradation, and suggest areas of future investigation likely to provide new insights into this process.