Ranciere and Law

This book is the first to approach Jacques Rancires work from a legal perspective. A former student of Louis Althusser, Rancire is one of the most important contemporary French philosophers of recent decades: offering an original and path-breaking way to think politics, democracy and aesthetics. Rancires work has received wide and increasing critical attention, but no study exists so far that reflects on the wider implications of Rancire for law and for socio-legal studies. Although Rancire does not pay much specific attention to lawand there is a strong temptation to identify law with what he terms the "police order"much of Rancires historical work highlights the creative potential of law and legal language, with important legal implications and ramifications. So, rather than excavate the Rancirean corpus for isolated statements about the law, this volume reverses such a method and asks: what would a Rancire-inspired legal theory look like? Bringing together specialists and scholars in different areas of law, critical theory and philosophy, this rethinking of law and socio-legal studies through Rancire provides an original and important engagement with a range of contemporary legal topics, including constituent power and democracy, legal subjectivity, human rights, practices of adjudication, refugees, the nomos of modernity, and the sensory configurations of law. It will, then, be of considerable interest to those working in these areas.