Mapping a Cultural Studies of Law

• Author: Naomi Mezey
• Pages: 39-55

The Handbook of Law and Society, First Edition. Edited by Austin Sarat and Patricia Ewick.

© 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Published 2015 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

Introduction to a Cultural Studies of Law

In this chapter I briefly map the terrain of a set of scholarly approaches that could be

called a cultural analysis of law. A cultural analysis or a cultural studies of law

generally starts with the dual premise that law is a set of meaning‐making practices

that exists within and is the product of a particular culture and that culture is a set of

meaning‐making practices that exists within and is the product of a particular set

oflaws (Geertz 1983; Coombe 1998; Sarat and Kearns 1998; Mezey 2001). In what

follows I unpack and elaborate this foundational idea.

At a minimum, a cultural analysis of law involves a commitment to subjecting law

to a deeply critical inquiry that does not adopt the law’s own internal claims to

meaning, truth, or legitimacy (Kahn 1999: 2). Neither does it assume that critiques

are unencumbered or objective, as all scholars are themselves embedded in both law

and culture. Most of this scholarship, however, either strives to create a critical dis-

tance from law’s self‐validating quality or it investigates the ways in which legal

discourse is self‐validating. What I take as foundational to a cultural study of law is

that the relationship between law and culture is not merely constitutive, but

“dynamic, interactive, and dialectical – law is both a producer of culture and an

object of culture. Put generally, law shapes individual and group identity, social

practices as well as the meaning of cultural symbols, but all of these things (culture

in its myriad manifestations) also shape law by changing what is socially desirable,

politically feasible, legally legitimate” (Mezey 2001: 46).

Methodologically, a cultural analysis of law borrows liberally from cultural and

literary theory, anthropology, history, sociology, and philosophy and takes as its

object of study law a set of cultural practices. Many approaches are possible from

Mapping a Cultural Studies of Law

Naomi Mezey

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40 Naomi Mez ey

this diverse set of humanistic lenses, just as many possible avenues of inquiry flow

from the basic assumption that law and culture are mutually constitutive. In map-

ping them, I repurpose James Clifford and Paul Gilroy’s distinction between cultural

roots and routes (Clifford, 1997; Gilroy, 1995). This chapter begins with a brief

account of the roots of a cultural studies of law in order to set the stage for an

examination of how a certain set of critical approaches to culture came to inform and

transform our understanding of law. I then lay out a few of the main routes by which

cultural analysis of law has traveled and the shrines and sights along those routes.

Given the diversity of approaches that can be characterized as cultural studies of law,

there are many avenues that could be mapped onto this scholarly landscape. There is no

town square or citadel to which these avenues lead, so the only option is to pick a few

well‐trod pathways and consider how they connect and diverge. I explore three routes

along which a cultural analysis of law has been productively pursued: (1) narration,

(2) identity, and (3) visuality. Narration is meant to embody a number of different

approaches that apply a literary sensibility and critique to the language, interpretation,

and rhetoric of law, legal arguments, and legal representations. It also seeks to capture

the ways that law and representations of law (in novels, films, and other cultural

artifacts) create certain kinds of enduring social narratives and tropes and perhaps

teach normative lessons. Identity is a route paved by a robust scholarship that examines

the role of law in developing, negotiating, policing, and enforcing certain kinds of

individual and collective identities, including racial, ethnic, sexual, national and subna-

tional identities that have been salient at different times. Lastly, I explore more briefly

the smaller path of visuality, a recent effort to critically engage with the prominent por-

trayals of law and legal institutions in our pervasively visual culture as well as with the

increasing use of visual arguments and iconography within law and legal practice.

The Roots of a Cultural Studies of Law

The roots of a cultural studies of law are found in various theoretical influences and

interdisciplinary methods that together constitute cultural studies as a critical tradi-

tion in its own right. There are many different histories of cultural studies that could

be told; my aim here is to mention the themes and concepts that most inform a

cultural studies of law generally and, more specifically, the routes that I map below.

In my previous work with Mark Niles (2005), we subscribed to the relatively

uncontroversial claim that modern cultural studies began in Britain in the 1960s at

the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies. These founding British

cultural critics, such as Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, focused on culture in at

least two senses, as

both the meanings and values which arise amongst distinctive social groups and

classes… through which they “handle” and respond to the conditions of existence;

andas the lived traditions and practices through which those “understandings” are

expressed and in which they are embodied. (Hall 1994: 527)