Overview

In Law by Night Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and ""take back the night"" rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law's nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night's potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.

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9781478020530

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Reviews

Bringing a highly sophisticated theoretical mind to a richly woven thick description of legal practices, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks how our conceptions of law would change if we thought about it from a metaphor of darkness. Throughout this fascinating and thought-provoking book, he attends to how public imaginaries of darkness are affected by race and gender and how the law of the dark has an ambiguous relation to human freedom and security. As he demonstrates, the law is obscure, complex, and lacks transparency-this is the law's own essential darkness. -- Linda Ross Meyer, author of * Sentencing in Time * In this highly original and intellectually creative book Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller recognizes that night is a real part of our temporal and material worlds as well as a metaphor for absence-the time and place where normal law is in abeyance. It is this confluence of the literal, conceptual, and metaphorical that makes Law by Night distinct. Goldberg-Hiller's juxtaposition of a variety of legal themes never previously brought together under the theme of night is nothing short of brilliant. -- Cressida J. Heyes, author of * Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge *

“Bringing a highly sophisticated theoretical mind to a richly woven thick description of legal practices, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks how our conceptions of law would change if we thought about it from a metaphor of darkness. Throughout this fascinating and thought-provoking book, he attends to how public imaginaries of darkness are affected by race and gender and how the law of the dark has an ambiguous relation to human freedom and security. As he demonstrates, the law is obscure, complex, and lacks transparency—this is the law’s own essential darkness.” -- Linda Ross Meyer, author of * Sentencing in Time * “In this highly original and intellectually creative book Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller recognizes that night is a real part of our temporal and material worlds as well as a metaphor for absence—the time and place where normal law is in abeyance. It is this confluence of the literal, conceptual, and metaphorical that makes Law by Night distinct. Goldberg-Hiller’s juxtaposition of a variety of legal themes never previously brought together under the theme of night is nothing short of brilliant.” -- Cressida J. Heyes, author of * Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge *

Author Information

Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, coeditor of Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights.

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