Studies in Law, Politics and Society: Volume 35

In this article, I examine the role of judicial narratives in constructing, constraining, and delimiting the boundaries of social scientific and expert knowledge – specifically, in the context of gay and lesbian parents’ custody and adoption cases. Examining not only the judicial narratives in appellate cases over the last fifty years in the United States, but also expert reports and briefs obtained from attorneys in these cases and interviews with judges, attorneys and litigants, I investigate the role of judicial narratives in adjudicating between competing social scientific claims about sexuality and child welfare, constructing expertise, and ultimately deciding what is valid knowledge and what is not. I focus specifically on the ways in which judges credit and discredit social scientific evidence, experts, and knowledge claims. The power of legal actors and particularly judges to police the boundaries of knowledge and expertise in the context of the custody case and the judicial narrative is complicated by the observation that this form of social scientific knowledge is not only the object acted upon and shaped by these power dynamics, but is also itself a source of power and legitimation.

This chapter addresses a five-year phase of protest activity set in motion by fathers’ rights and shared parenting groups’ resistance to the Federal Child Support Guidelines, which were incorporated into Canada’s Divorce Act in 1997. Drawing upon Department of Justice discourses, parliamentary hearings and debates, and advocacy websites it examines the dynamics and outcomes of the protest cycle. It argues that the government’s legislative response signals a failure of fathers’ rights activism in Canada. This failure is a consequence of the collective identity that advocates and their supporters enact and celebrate in various public arenas, the effectiveness of feminist counteraction, and the contingencies of governance in Canada’s left-of-centre advanced liberal democracy.

Anatomy of a Murder, a beloved, highly influential, seemingly liberal 1959 classic law-film seems to appropriate some of the fading western genre’s features and social functions, intertwining the professional-plot western formula with a hero-lawyer variation on the classic western hero character, America’s 19th century archetypal True Man. In so doing, Anatomy revives the western genre’s honor code, embracing it into the hero-lawyer law-film. Concurrently, it accommodates the development of cinematic imagery of the emerging, professional elite groups, offering the public the notion of the professional super-lawyer, integrating legal professionalism with natural justice. In the course of establishing its Herculean lawyer, the film constitutes its female protagonist as a potential threat, subjecting her to a cinematic judgment of her sexual character and reinforcing the honor-based notion of woman’s sexual-guilt.

This paper seeks to explain the jury’s verdict of acquittal in the bizarre case of eccentric millionaire Robert Durst, who was charged with the murder of Morris Black after Black’s body parts were found floating in Galveston Bay off the coast of Texas. Though an analysis of a portion of the defense’ closing argument, this paper examines the Durst defense team’s strategy of directing the jury’s attention to a single event – the confrontation that resulted in Black’s death – in order to effect a shift in focus that allowed them to use “reasonable doubt” to leverage their argument that the prosecution had not met its burden of proof. This paper demonstrates how this strategy acted to construct the “unreasonable doubt” that resulted in the jury’s verdict.

This article focuses on one court case concerning the regulation of Anti-Abortion protesting and asks: (1) Do the various actors involved in this case recognize a tension between their actions and their broader beliefs concerning the regulation of political protests? (2) If this tension is recognized, how do the actors resolve it, and if it is not recognized, why is it not? While concerned with legal consciousness and cognitive dissonance, the article is framed by broader questions concerning tolerance and the interaction of law and political passions.

This essay outlines a critical theory of everyday resistance. This theory adopts a de-centered conception of law and power, and draws upon the theory of deliberative democracy to specify the conditions under which such power becomes illegitimate. This allows us to see everyday resistance as a symptom that discursive power has been generated under unjust conditions. Such an approach opens a new path of research in which we study everyday resistance as a response to the participatory deficits that exist in contemporary systems of power, and then identify the possibilities and obstacles for remedying those deficits.