UCB Townsend Working Group on Law & Contemporary Theory presents:
A SYMPOSIUM IN LAW AND HUMANITIES
MONDAY, APRIL 3
308A DOE LIBRARY
MORNING SESSION
10 - 12: Colloquium
Material Compositions of Legality:
Executive Orders through the Lenses of Text, Media and Bodies.
Conveners: Hyo Yoon Kang and Sara Kendall, Kent Law School
This colloquium examines the legal materiality of Trump=s recent executive orders on
immigration. If the usual approach is to ask if these orders are "proper law," the line of inquiry
pursued here suggests that not all of the important factors that go into a legal event are
recognisable as a matter of and for law.
Issues ranging from the lack of formal legal training of one of the order=s main drafters to the
subsequent "guidance" issued by White House counsel restricting the ban=s application
complicate and illuminate the nature of law making. Doctrinal legal analysis would consider only
the constitutional basis of the order and track its interpretation by the judiciary.
Thinking about legal materiality, by contrast, examines the order within a broader assemblage of
agency: from the inscription of the president=s signature and his performance of displaying the
text itself to the public, to its dissemination through and contestation over Twitter, to the legal
uptake of social media utterances. The order appears as an entwined and heavily mediated event.
The effects are multiple and material: from the act of sovereign inscription to its grave
biopolitical effects of dividing and disenfranchising the populations that it targets.
Participants: Mark Antaki, Mario Biagioli, Marianne Constable, Maria Drakopoulou, James
Martel, Genevieve Painter, Connal Parsley, Karl Shoemaker, Jill Stauffer
12 - 2 : LUNCH (on your own)
AFTERNOON SESSION
2 - 5: Workshop Papers*
Welcome (and closing):
James Martel, San Francisco State
Karl Shoemaker, University of Wisconsin
2:15 - 3:15
Playing with Beliefs: When the State Comes between Religion, Property and Sex
Davina Cooper, University of Kent
Commentator/Moderator: Sean Becker, UCB
Given the conventional association of states with rationality, gravity, instrumental action and
painful, oppressive, coercive activity, can there be any place within a critical progressive politics
for states to be playful and to play? Is play a good register for governing? This paper addresses
these questions through the context of state-engaged play in relation to the institutionalisation of
“possessive beliefs,” a neo/liberal paradigm which treats social identities, in general, and the
beliefs associated with particular identities, in particular, as “belonging” in property-like ways to
those who hold them.
3:15 - 3:45: Coffee Break (provided)
3: 45 - 4:45
Jacques Rancière and the Dramaturgy of Law
Julen Etxabe, Docent in Legal Theory and Researcher, Helsinki Collegium for Advanced
Studies
Commentator/Moderator: Kavitha Iyengar, UCB
This essay re-creates a Rancierian landscape to elaborate a theatrical model of law. The analysis
focuses on jurisgenetic moments of dissensus, when those who are in principle without a place in
the order of legalism are nevertheless able to stage a disagreement that reconfigures the entire
realm of law. The paper thus investigates how a claim perceived to be legally irrelevant can
nevertheless be heard and registered as a novel legal inscription.
6 - 8 RECEPTION
*For copies of papers, please go to Law & Contemporary Theory website
(http://townsendgroups.berkeley.edu/group/law-and-contemporary-theory) or contact
[email protected] or [email protected].