Scholars of culture, humanities and social sciences have increasingly come to an appreciation of the importance of the legal domain in social life, while critically engaged socio-legal scholars around the world have taken up the task of understanding "Law's Empire" in all of its cultural, political, and economic dimensions. The questions arising from these intersections, and addressing imperialisms past and present forms the subject matter of a special symposium issue of Social Identities under the editorship of Griffith University's Rob McQueen, and UBC's Wes Pue and with contributions from McQueen, Ian Duncanson, Renisa Mawani, David Williams, Emma Cunliffe, Chidi Oguamanam, W. Wesley Pue, Fatou Camara, and Dianne Kirkby. This paper introduces the volume, forthcoming in late 2007. The central problematique of this issue has previously been explored through the 2005 Law's Empire conference, an informal but vibrant postcolonial legal studies network.

Law's Empire

政治自由主义 = Political liberalism

Despite a high and growing global average income, billions of human beings are still condemned to life long severe poverty, with all its attendant evils of low life expectancy, social exclusion, ill health, illiteracy, dependency, and effective enslavement. The annual death toll from poverty-related causes is around 18 million, or one-third of all human deaths, which adds up to approximately 270 million deaths since the end of the Cold War.

/pdf/world-poverty-and-human-rights-5bpgnmdbjt.pdf

World Poverty and Human Rights

Contemporary Sociology 7(5) (September 1978):566—68. When the intellectual history of our times comes to be written, that peculiarly Left Bank mixture of Marxism and structuralism now in fashion will be among the most puzzlingofourideastoevaluate.Aliteral “archeology of knowledge” (the title of one of Foucault’s earlier books) will be required to sort out the valuable from the obvious rubbish. I suspect that in this exercise the iconographers of the present (like Barthes) will fare less well than those who have read the past. Of such “historians” (a description which does not really cover his method) Foucault is the most dazzlingly creative. Discipline and Punish (which, shamefully, has taken over two years to be translated into English) follows Madness and Civilization (1961) and The Birth of the Clinic (1971) as the next stage in Foucault’s massive project of tracing the genealogy of control institutions (asylums, teaching hospitals, prisons) and the human sciences symbiotically linked with them (psychiatry, clinical medicine, criminology, penology). His concern throughout is the relationship between power and knowledge, the articulation of each on the other. Here (as he makes explicit in an interview recently published in the English journal, Radical Philosophy) he opposes the humanist position that, once we gain power, we cease to know——it makes us blind—— and that only those who keep their distance from power, who are no way implicated in tyranny, can attain the truth. For Foucault, such forms of knowledge as psychiatry and criminology (with its “garrulous discourses” and “intermidable [sic] repetitions”) are directly related to the exercise of power. Power itself creates new objects of knowledge and accumulates new bodies of information. Thus to “liberate scientific research from the demands of monopoly capitalism” can only be a slogan. Placing such programmatic Big Issues on one side, though, a superficial first reading of the book mightstartatthelevelofitssubtitle, “The Birth of the Prison.” The key historical transition——at the end of the eighteenth century——is from punishment as torture, a public spectacle, to the more economically and politically discreet prison sentence. The body as the major target of penal repression disappears: within a few decades, the grisly spectacles of torture, dismemberment, exposure, amputation, and branding are over. Interest is transferred from the body to the mind; a coercive, solitary, and secret mode of punishment replaces one that was representative, scenic, and collective. Gone is the liturgy of torture and execution, where the triumph of the sovereign was symbolized in the processions, halts at crossroads, public readings of the sentence even after death, where the criminal’s corpse was exhibited or burnt. In its place comes a whole technology of subtle power. When punishment leaves the domain of more or less everyday perception and enters into abstract consciousness, it does not become less effective. But its effectiveness arises from its inevitability not its horrific theatrical intensity. The new power is not to punish less but to In Retrospect: 1978 29

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0094306118815499a

Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison:

By comparison with the perplexing and undeveloped state of this subject, domestic political theory is very well understood, with multiple highly developed theories offering alternative solutions to well-defined problems By contrast, concepts and theories of global justice are in the early stages of formation, and it is not clear what the main questions are, let alone the main possible answers I believe that the need for workable ideas about the global or international case presents political theory with its most important current task, and even perhaps with the opportunity to make a practical contribution in the long run, though perhaps only the very long run The theoretical and normative questions I want to discuss are closely related to pressing practical questions that we now face about the legitimate path forward in the governance of the world These are, inevitably, questions about institutions, many of which do not yet exist However imperfectly, the nation-state is the primary locus of political legitimacy and the pursuit of justice, and it is one of the advantages of domestic political theory that nation-states actually exist But when we are

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/3558011

The Problem of Global Justice

Liberalism has difficulty with the fact of state borders. Liberals are, on the one hand, committed to moral equality, so that the simple fact of humanity is sufficient to motivate a demand for equal concern and respect. Liberal principles, on the other hand, are traditionally applied only within the context of the territorial state, which seems to place an arbitrary limit on the range within which liberal guarantees will apply. This difficulty is particularly stark in the context of distributive justice; state boundaries, after all, often divide not simply one jurisdiction from another, but the rich from the poor as well. Allowing these boundaries to determine distributive shares seems to place an almost feudal notion of birthright privilege back into the heart of liberal theory. This difficulty has led many philosophers to argue that some revision of liberal theory is necessary. These proposals frequently involve either the demand that liberalism focus on previously neglected particularistic commitments, or the demand that it abandon such local concerns and endorse a cosmopolitan vision of distributive justice. What I want to do in this article is identify a different way in which liberalism might deal with the worries created by the fact of state borders. My argument is that a globally impartial liberal theory is not in-

Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy

https://pubs.rsna.org/doi/pdf/10.1148/rg.245035224

Preoperative Hepatic Vascular Evaluation with CT and MR Angiography: Implica-

When states assert the right to exclude unwanted would-be immigrants, they are asserting a right to use coercive force. Those who attempt to cross the borders of the state will be met with violence; borders have guards, after all, and these guards have guns. That these facts are rarely questioned in our world does not mean that they are not morally exceptional. Those who propose to use violence must justify to others, in a manner that respects the moral equality of all, why they have a right to do so. If the state demands the right to use coercive force in repelling would-be immigrants, it has to justify its right to do so.

Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion

Many contemporary theories of immigration begin with the idea that we obtain the right to exclude, because there are some goods that can be produced only within bounded societies. I believe these views to be mistaken, both ethically and empirically. More plausible accounts of the right to exclude begin with the idea that individuals have rights, in virtue of their moral rights of association or of property, to avoid admitting foreigners into their societies. I believe these accounts have to be amended to make reference to the juridical nature of the modern state. My own view is that the right to exclude is grounded in the right to avoid becoming the agent charged with the defense of another’s human rights – unless there is some independent moral reason one ought to become so charged. This account is able to ground the right to exclude, but does not justify the ways in which modern states employ that putative right.

The right to exclude

Introduction: Toby Ziegler's Faith 1 On the Possibility of a Just State 2 States, Persons, and Equality 3 Tolerance, Imperialism, and Democracy 4 Poverty, Inequality, and Politics 5 Economic Justice, Coercion, and Foreign Policy

Michael Blake

Papers

Distributive Justice, State Coercion, and Autonomy

Preoperative Hepatic Vascular Evaluation with CT and MR Angiography: Implica-

Immigration, Jurisdiction, and Exclusion

The right to exclude

Justice and Foreign Policy