Introduction.

• Author: Franke, Katherine

Each year Columbia Law School's Center for Gender Sexuality Law selects a scholar whose work has made an important impact on the study and practice of gender and/or sexuality law. For 2010 we selected Judith Butler, the Maxine Elliot Professor in the Departments of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. In March of 2010, we held a Symposium recognizing the multiple domains of theory and activism in which Butler's mark has been profound, and oft times paradigm shifting.

Columbia Law School has the great fortune of having developed one of the deepest and most diverse faculties engaged in the study of the law of gender and sexuality. In turn, this has drawn a most magnificent body of students to our law school, many of who were involved in making this Symposium a success. I want to acknowledge and thank them for their hard work. Our students, no less than those of us who work in the academy, are the beneficiaries over and again of the creativity and sheer courage of Butler's ideas.

The contributors to this Symposium come together to appreciate a body of work, and to take stock of the influence of that work on a discipline not typically hospitable to the insights and critiques of a scholar whose training and intellectual archive lie beyond the traditional pickets of law. Yet starting with Gender Trouble, and continuing through the more recent work on war, humanitarianism and grievable lives, Judith Butler has distinguished herself as among the most important contemporary scholars of law. Having pledged no fidelity to any of law's sacred dominions, Butler's writing has unmasked, disarmed and disassembled many of the foundational truths of law with tools more precise and devastating than those that any scholar from within the legal academy has been able to generate. Yet unlike the analytic cul-de-sac in which we found ourselves after reading the legal realists and their progeny, the Critical Legal Studies scholars, Butler's work does much more than merely point out law's internal contradictions, essentially political nature, or ways in which the rule of law, in the end, serves the powerful and privileged.

Her scholarship offers...