Marianne Constable

The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changing Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge

Marianne Constable
1994

The Law of the Other is an account of the English doctrine of the “mixed jury”. Constable’s excavation of the historical, rhetorical, and theoretical foundations of modern law recasts our legal and sociological understandings of the American jury and our contemporary conceptions of law, citizenship, and truth.


The “mixed jury” doctrine allowed resident foreigners to have law suits against English natives tried before juries composed half of natives and half of aliens like themselves. As she traces the transformations in this doctrine from the Middle Ages to its abolition...

Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases: Fundamental Issues in Law and Society Research

Marianne Constable
Austin Sarat
David Engel
Valerie Hans
Susan Lawrence
1998

Everyday Practices and Trouble Cases asks how law helps to constitute the worlds in which we live every day, and how law responds to disruptions and disputes that arise in various realms. Leading scholars explore the dichotomy between everyday practices and trouble cases, and the way various kinds of research have addressed that dichotomy, illuminating the pervasive role of law in social life as well as the capacity of law to respond to social conflict.

Northwestern University Press, 1998

Just Silences: The Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law

Marianne Constable
2007

Is the Miranda warning, which lets an accused know of the right to remain silent, more about procedural fairness or about the conventions of speech acts and silences? Do U.S. laws about Native Americans violate the preferred or traditional “silence” of the peoples whose religions and languages they aim to “protect” and “preserve”? In Just Silences, Marianne Constable draws on such examples to explore what is at stake in modern law: a potentially new silence as to justice.


Grounding her claims about modern law in rhetorical analyses of U.S. law and...

Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts

Marianne Constable
2014

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...

Introducion: Law at the Intersection of History and Theory

Marianne Constable
Sylvia Schafer
2018

History of the Present, Spring 2018, Vol. 8: 1. “Law at the Intersection of History and Theory”