'Law as . . .': Theory and Practice in Legal History

Abstract

AFTERWORD 1041 influence of "law and" in their resort to synchronic analyses of relational conjunction and disjunction, to which they add diachrony in order to reveal the effect of law, or to explain its reality, by assessing change in its relation to other phenomena over time. Unsurprisingly, the animating hypotheses of twentiethcentury legal history embrace the same broad relational problematics that have preoccupied twentieth century "law and" theory: instrumentalism, relative autonomy, mutual constitutiveness, legal construction, autopoiesis, and indeterminacy. 10 The shift to "law as. . ." suggests something else, something distinctive. Concretely, it suggests that explanations of law are not to be found, either necessarily or sufficiently, in its relations to other things. As Shai Lavi notes, with justification, the shift affords an opportunity to think beyond long-familiar Weberian categories and trajectories. 11 It is not determinedly programmatic, a route to the next big concept, but open-ended (hence the ellipsis). Yet it would be idle to pretend that "law as. . ." takes no position, that it is not historically situated. Blithely unaware of it at the outset, the conveners of the conference where the essays here were first presented have discovered that we are on a path that others are also following. We find ourselves riding a wave, one reverberating in both legal 12 and historical 13 scholarship. The wave owes its existence to developments in both history and law. As to the latter, it has never been more of a "hypostatized construct" than at present. 14 We return to this observation below. 15 But what of the former? It, too, hypostatizes itself, though in a more limited sense, being a professional practice with less instrumental reach. Still, as a professional practice, contemporary history, like law, is full of talk of itself. History's talk is of what history has to offer the present. 16 One offering is the narrative history that has become something of a staple of literary nonfiction. Narrative history represents history as edifying stories of the past. As Gordon

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“…Del mismo modo, como han observado Jean y John Comaroff (2009), desde hace unas décadas presenciamos un "fetichismo de la ley", el cual se puede apreciar en las constituciones escritas y reescritas desde 1989, en el énfasis en los derechos, en la emergencia de nuevas formas de "legalidad transnacional" y de ONG orientadas hacia lo legal; en la judicialización de la política así como en la hegemonía del discurso sobre los derechos humanos. De acuerdo con ellos, "la ley" aparece en el presente más y más como un fetiche: una abstracción hecha real, una abstracción altamente animada a la cual se le atribuye la capacidad mítica, numinosa de configurar el mundo a su propia imagen (ver también Tomlins y Comaroff 2011Comaroff :1067. contravengan los intereses de las elites políticas y económicas.…”

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