Tuesday, January 24, 2017 - 12:30pm to 1:45pm
Location: 
Solarium (room FA2) Falconer Hall - 84 Queen's Park

Critical Analysis of Law Workshop Series

presents

Brian Connolly
University of South Florida Dept. of History

Law and the Archive of Sovereignty

  Tuesday, January 24, 2017
12:30 – 1:45
Solarium (room FA2), Falconer Hall
84 Queen’s Park 

In the nineteenth-century United States, sovereignty seems to have been caught in a tense struggle between two poles.  On the one hand, it has become something of a truism that under the regime of popular sovereignty, sovereign power was coincident with the law.  As Thomas Paine put it, “in America the law is king.”  Or, as the legal scholar Paul Kahn puts it, “in a system of political belief that takes popular sovereignty as its first principle, the rule of law must appear to represent the people: law is authoritative because it is representative.”  Both evince a desire for locating sovereignty in the law.  Yet, on the other hand, democratic rule is marked by the absence of a locatable site of sovereign power.  As the political theorist Claude Lefort puts it in a well-known passage, “Democracy is instituted and sustained by the dissolution of markers of certainty. It inaugurates a history in which people experience a fundamental indeterminacy as to the basis of power, law, and knowledge…at every level of social life.” 

In this paper, I argue, through a reading of Polydore v. Prince (1838) and its attendant archive, that sovereign power operates not in spite of but rather precisely through this tension. In particular, I pay close attention to the figuration of marriage and family in international law treatises in the early nineteenth century.  As sovereignty was figured as secured by territorial borders, the recognition of “foreign marriages” undercut both the inviolability of borders and the sovereign power of the law.  In reasserting such sovereign power, the legal apparatus relied on the proliferation of sovereignty’s attachments in print public culture, and thus, required extra-legal justification its sovereign prerogative .  In the end, I argue that attention to an overlooked archive of sovereignty reorients our understanding of both sovereign power and its legal operations in the nineteenth-century United States.

Brian Connolly is Associate Professor of History at the University of South Florida and was a Member in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study (2015-2016).  He is the author of Domestic Intimacies: Incest and the Liberal Subject in Nineteenth-Century America (Pennsylvania, 2014).  He is also editor of History of the Present: A Journal of Critical History.  His current book project is tentatively entitled Sovereignty’s Archive: Law, Kinship, and Religion in the Nineteenth-Century United States.

For more workshop information, please contact Nadia Gulezko at n.gulezko@utoronto.ca