Our Word Is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (The Cultural Lives of Law)

Words can be misspoken, misheard, misunderstood, or misappropriated; they can be inappropriate, inaccurate, dangerous, or wrong. When speech goes wrong, law often steps in as itself a speech act or series of speech acts. __Our Word Is Our Bond__ offers a nuanced approach to language and its interaction and relations with modern law. Marianne Constable argues that, as language, modern law makes claims and hears claims of justice and injustice, which can admittedly go wrong. Constable proposes an alternative to understanding law as a system of rules, or as fundamentally a policy-making and problem-solving tool. Constable introduces and develops insights from Austin, Cavell, Reinach, Nietzsche, Derrida and Heidegger to show how claims of law are performative and passionate utterances or social acts that appeal implicitly to justice.__Our Word Is Our Bond__ explains that neither law nor justice are what lawyers and judges say, nor what officials and scholars claim they are. However inadequate our law and language may be to the world, Constable argues that we know our world and name our ways of living and being in it through law and language. Justice today, however impossible to define and difficult to determine, depends on relations we have with one another through language and on the ways in which legal speech—the claims and responses that we make to one another in the name of the law—acts. Words can be misspoken, misheard, misunderstood, or misappropriated; they can be inappropriate, inaccurate, dangerous, or wrong. When speech goes wrong, law often steps in as itself a speech act or series of speech acts. Our Word Is Our Bond offers a nuanced approach to language and its interaction and relations with modern law. Marianne Constable argues that, as language, modern law makes claims and hears claims of justice and injustice, which can admittedly go wrong. Constable proposes an alternative to understanding law as a system of rules, or as fundamentally a policy-making and problem-solving tool. Constable introduces and develops insights from Austin, Cavell, Reinach, Nietzsche, Derrida and Heidegger to show how claims of law are performative and passionate utterances or social acts that appeal implicitly to justice. Our Word Is Our Bond explains that neither law nor justice are what lawyers and judges say, nor what officials and scholars claim they are. However inadequate our law and language may be to the world, Constable argues that we know our world and name our ways of living and being in it through law and language. Justice today, however impossible to define and difficult to determine, depends on relations we have with one another through language and on the ways in which legal speech—the claims and responses that we make to one another in the name of the law—acts. La 4e de couverture indique : "Words can be misspoken, misheard, misunderstood, or misappropriated ; they can be inappropriate, inaccurate, dangerous, or wrong. When speech goes wrong, law often steps in as itself a speech act or series of speech acts. In Our word is our bond, Marianne Constable proposes understanding law as language, rather than as primarly rules or policy or force. Introducing and developing insights from Austin, Cavell, Reinach, Nietzsche, Derrida and Heidegger, she argues that modern law makes and hears imperfect - incomplete and on-going, yet interruptible - claims of justice and of injustice. Such claims are performative and passionate utterances or social acts. Our word is our bond explains that we know and name our ways of living and being in the world, however inadequately, through law and language. Law and justice are not simply what lawyers or judges say or do, nor even what officials and scholars claim they are, though. Justice depends implicitly on relations of language and law and on the ways in whch legal speech - the imperfect claims and responses that we make to one another in the name of the law - acts." This Book Investigates Modern Law's Relation To Language In The Context Of Such Divergent Views. To Those Who Ask, What Is Law? The Book Argues That Answers Today Lie In Exploring Further Law's Relations To Claiming And Hearing. Claims Assert Truths And Demand Recognition. Law, Like Language, May Deceive Or He Or Go Wrong In Its Claims. Further, Law May Mishear And Be Misheard. Modern Law Nevertheless Shows Great Care For Language. From The Care That Law Accords To Language, This Book Shows, One Learns About Speech; Reciprocally, Through Language And Speech, One Learns About Law. Both Language And Law Bind Us; They Entangle And Obligate Us To One Another And Reveal The World To Be One In Which Our Word Is Our Bond. -- Introduction. Introduction : Obama's Oaths -- How To Do Things With Law -- Learning By The Rules -- Legal Acts As Social Acts -- When Words Go Wrong -- Conclusion : In The Name Of The Law. Marianne Constable. Includes Bibliographical References (pages [195]-208) And Index.