Areas of Interest

Legal rhetoric and philosophy; theories of interpretation; social and political thought; Anglo-American legal traditions; contemporary law and society

Bio

Marianne Constable is working on a history of the "new unwritten law," which ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago. She is the author of Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (2005). Her earlier book, The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge, won the Law and Society Association's J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History. She has published on a wide range of topics in legal rhetoric and philosophy: Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of "community," the role of law in the liberal arts, Frederick Schauer on rules, Robert Cover on violence, and Montsquieu on systems. She has co-edited two books on law and society and currently serves as Book Review Editor for the journal, Law, Culture, and the Humanities. She was awarded a Distinguished Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award in 2002-03.

Selected Publications

Books

Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton University Press, 2005)

The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (University of Chicago Press, 1994)

Edited Collections

Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases in Law and Society Research, eds. Austin Sarat, Marianne Constable, David Engel, Valerie Hans, Susan Lawrence (Northwestern University Press, 1998).

Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research, eds. Austin Sarat, Marianne Constable, David Engel, Valerie Hans, Susan Lawrence (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1998).

Articles

"On Not Leaving Law to the Lawyers," ed. Austin Sarat, Law and the Liberal Arts (Cornell University Press, 2004).

"The Silence of the Law: Justice in Robert Cover's `Field of Pain and Death'," ed. Austin Sarat, Law, Violence and the Possibilities of Justice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), 85-100.

"The Rhetoric of Community: Civil Society and the Legal Order," eds. Bryant Garth, Robert Kagan and Austin Sarat, Looking Back at Law's Century: Time, Memory, Change (Cornell University Press, 2001), 213-231.

"The Library at the Turn of the Century," Chronicles of the University of California, no. 4, Fall 2000, 138-156.

"Laying Aside the Law: The Silences of Presumptive Positivism," ed. Linda Meyer, Essays in Honor of Frederick Schauer, (Oxford: Hart Publishing Company, 1999), 61-78.

"Reflections on Law as a Profession of Words," in Bryant Garth and Austin Sarat, eds., Justice and Power in Sociolegal Research (Northwestern University Press, 1998) 19-35.

"Beyond Legal Positivism: Where the State Ends," in Marijan Pavcnik & Gianfrancesco Zanetti, eds., Legal Systems and Legal Science (Proceedings of the 17th I.V.R. World Congress of International Association of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, ARSP-Beiheft 70:4, Franz Steiner Verlag, 1997), 123-126. 

"The Regents on Race and Diversity: Reflections and Representations," representations 55 (Summer 1996) 92-97.

"A New Conception of Law?"  Law & Society Review 29:4 (1995) 593-597.

"Introductory Comment" to Symposium on "The Law's Gaze: Detection, Fiction and the Law," Studies in Law, Politics and Society, vol. 14 (1994) 3-7.

"Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Social Scientification of Law," Law and Social Inquiry 19:3 (Summer 1994), 551-590. "Droit, sociologie et nihilisme," (a shorter version of "Genealogy and Jurisprudence: Nietzsche, Nihilism and the Social Scientification of Law"), Futur anterieur, no. 19_20 (1993/5_6)

"Rejoinder: Thinking Nonsociologically about Sociological Law," Law & Social Inquiry, 19:3 (Summer 1994) 625-638.

"Sovereignty and Governmentality in Modern American Immigration Law," Studies in Law, Politics and Society 13 (1993) 249-271.

"The Modern Jury: Fact and Law in Law and Society," Journal of American Culture, special issue on Law in American Culture, 15:1 (Spring 1992) 37-44.

"Sociological Justice and Jurisprudential Nihilism," Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 11:1 (Spring 1991) 114-124.

"Foucault and Walzer: Sovereignty, Strategy, and the State," Polity XXIV (Winter 1991) 269-293.

"What Books About Juries Reveal About Social Science and Law,"  Law and Social Inquiry 16:2 (Spring 1991) 353-372.

Book Reviews

Introduction to Symposium on Lloyd Burton, Worship and Wilderness: Culture, Religion and Law in Public Lands Management, in Law & Society Review (forthcoming)

Introduction to Symposium on Robert P. Burns' A Theory of the Trial, in 28 Law and Social Inquiry (2003), 523-526.

Aviam Soifer, Law and the Company We Keep, in Contemporary Sociology 26:3 (May l997) 362-3.

Mary Ann Glendon, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, in Contemporary Sociology 22:2 (March 1993) 237-38.

Fred Dolan and Thomas Dumm, eds., Rhetorical Republic: Governing Representations in American Politics, in Qui Parle 7:1 (Fall/Winter 1993) 159-168.

Catharine A. MacKinnon, Towards a Feminist Theory of the State, in Women & Politics 13:1, 1993, 100-102.