Structuralist and Post-Structuralist Legal History

Abstract

This chapter begins with a discussion of postmodernism and its suggestive gestures. It then turns to the post-structuralist posture of legal history, and concludes with a summary of its structuralist rival. It argues that if we imagine postmodernism as a family of suggestions for historicizing the legal world, we can also imagine post-structuralism and structuralism as two historical postures, two ways of practising the postmodern. The post-structuralist posture, sketched through the medium of the genealogy, embraces certain postmodern anxieties, and runs with them. The structuralist posture, sketched through the medium of archaeology, is similarly receptive to the postmodern. But rather than let postmodernism run riot in a flattened and hybridized present, the structuralist posture performs rather differently. The structuralist experiences the dizzying vertigo of the genealogy, and in the midst of the free-fall, erects grand, totalizing structures of legal thought.

Review of Legal History

“…Other scholars are more explicit and more obviously concerned with charting a course along the tightrope between contingency and grand narratives. Desautels-Stein urges for a return to structuralism in legal history in the hope of ‘generat[ing] intelligibility, not through the postmodern elaboration of a never-ending series of contexts, but through the construction of image and style, constrained by and operating through a conceptual structure’ (2015: 42; 2018). His point is that the law and legal argument are not unconstrained and law is not ‘endlessly indeterminate’ (Desautels-Stein, 2015: 54; see also Webber, 2006: 7).…”

Language Strategies in Legal Reasoning of Judgments: an Engagement-Adaptation Model

“…Legal reasoning relates not only to the knowledge of jurisprudence, but also to the use of language. The previous studies on legal reasoning are conducted primarily from the perspective of structuralist (Hermann, 1975), rhetoric (Manzin, 2012), semantics (Brewer & Scott, 1996;Khachatryan, 2014;Ronald & Stamper, 1991;Verenich, 2012), pragmatics (Brewer & Scott, 1996;Feteris & Eveline, 2016) and semiotics (Verenich, 2012), all of which push forward the researches on legal reasoning and facilitate our understanding of this particular genre. However, the heteroglossia of the reasoning of judgments is ignored in previous studies.…”