Office and persona of the critical jurist: Peripheral legal thought (Australia)

The challenge raised by the editors of this book and by the work of Duncan Kennedy is to encapsulate something about the contemporariness of contemporary legal thought that is not simply what people – jurists, scholars, and the critical intelligentsia – are doing at the moment. Contributors, it was suggested, might want to look for “signs of the transcendence” of the chaos or at least the lack of form of contemporary legal thought. This chapter annotates some forms of the cultivation and training of the persona and office of the critical jurist (these are all terms that will be elaborated). It notes the ways in which training in the persona of the critical jurist is undertaken through the work of establishing patterns of law and lawful relations (or ways of living with law). To do so, it reports on some of the ways in which critical jurists worry about “signs of transcendence.” The annotations are delivered from Australia. Over the past fifteen years Duncan Kennedy has presented a restatement of his analysis of legal thought and his work as a critical legal scholar. In offering accounts of the globalizations of legal thought, he has presented his work as an analysis of contemporary legal thought, as a resource for the critical intelligentsias of the periphery in their own critical projects, and, it might be imagined, as a practice of (critical legal) freedom. The first part of this chapter addresses Duncan Kennedy’s style and mode of analysis as a form of training in and cultivation of the persona and, with some hesitation, the office, of the critical jurist (as indicated, these terms will receive elaboration). It argues that this training in personality has been globalized along with forms of contemporary and critical legal thought. Alongside Kennedy’s account of the training of the critical jurist, a number of accounts of the cultivation of a persona and office are annotated that might be imagined as part of the task of considering Australia, however partially, as belonging to a lawful rather than a lawless South. This geographic and juridical South is not identical to the political-economic global south, since it addresses the conduct and patterning of lawful relations. It is one way, through laws of nations, to address patterns of globalization of legal thought. This concern with the conduct of lawful relations might be one of the imagined, peripheral, addresses of Kennedy’s more recent work.