LEGAL THEORY WORKSHOP
Presents:
Alice Ristroph
Brooklyn Law School
Exceptionalist Jurisprudence aka The Law of the Snowflake
Friday, April 5, 2019
12:30 - 2:00
Room FL219 (John Willis Classroom)
Flavelle House
78 Queen's Park
Tax law is special, unlike other areas of law, and so is antitrust law, and bankruptcy law, and patent law, and immigration law, and family law, and cyber law, and foreign relations law, and even all of constitutional law. The past decade has seen a proliferation of claims of “exceptionalism” in each of these legal fields and others, along with a few follow-up declarations of normalization and assimilation. This paper examines these claims that an entire field or subfield of law is exceptional in comparison to the rest of law. To the extent that we think of law as norm(s) or rule(s) and the exception as extralegal, the discovery of so much exceptionalism within the law prompts questions about legal taxonomies and legal theory more generally. A study of exceptionalist arguments suggests that accounts of law, with their great emphasis on norms and rules, may need to give more attention to decisions and decision-makers – to the human agents who make legal decisions, and who make or rely upon decisions about law’s own conceptual categories. Discussions of exceptionalism—and the related discourses of normalization and assimilation—are efforts to evaluate, challenge, or reinscribe the categories through which we understand and implement law. These discourses, like the classifications they challenge, are projects of knowledge-creation that deserve our attention.
Alice Ristroph joined Brooklyn Law School in 2017. She teaches and writes in criminal law and procedure, constitutional law, and political theory, with particular emphasis on issues of violence and resistance. Her recent work examines laws that regulate state violence, focusing especially on the law's distribution of risks of physical harm. She has also been studying ways in which the law suppresses, tolerates, or even facilitates various forms of resistance to criminal justice institutions. Her scholarship has appeared in Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, California Law Review, Constitutional Commentary, Virginia Law Review, UCLA Law Review, and other journals. Professor Ristroph is a member of the American Law Institute. She serves on the Executive Committee of the AALS Section on Jurisprudence.
To be added to the paper distribution list, please email events.law@utoronto.ca. For further information, please contact Professor Larissa Katz (larissa.katz@utoronto.ca) and Professor Sophia Moreau (sr.moreau@utoronto.ca).
