Jurisprudence as Ideology

No doubt legal doctrine can be an intriguing research field, but my research interests turned early to philosophy. It seemed - somehow - to be more open to Marx and socialist politics than law. Then, after Vietnam and from the USA and the UK came Critical Legal Theory. Marxism, sociology, feminism, critical race theory, and then a second wave Foucault, discourse theory, deconstruction: the critique of jurisprudence arrived as a wide and open research agenda with a `left' politics. Jurisprudence as Ideology aimed at a theory of the fetish character attaching to rights. It took three schools of Anglophone jurisprudence as its research object and argued, by analogy with Marx's idea of commodity fetishism, that each school dissembled the value of law. It stands up, I still think, in many ways, but I quickly realised that I had not conceptualised rights fetishism and turned to Hegel in an intended short foray into Marx's philosophical background. Hegel, however, turned my philosophical ideas on their head and lead me to think that also Marx lacked a concept of fetish phenomena: that indeed, so cunning is reason as to present in this guise its own being at odds with itself. That then poses the question of the realm and the method for researching this antinomical dimension of `pure reason'. One road leads back to Kant and further into philosophy. The other to logic in its modern mathematical form. The privilege of freedom from teaching and administration has given me the time to venture down both roads as well as to continue researching the common law's response to the claims put to it by aboriginal peoples.

Este libro me está rompiendo la cabeza. Casi tanto como el de Scheingold, The Politics of Rights, hace unos años. Los dos se relacionan, vinculan, hablan entre sí, desde dos lugares diferentes --sociología y constitucional y filosofía del derecho-- casi sin saberlo. En el texto de arriba la autora explica cómo llegó allí, y cómo continuó su viaje.