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4 Law, Culture & Human. 1 (2008)

handle is hein.journals/lculh4 and id is 1 raw text is: Law, Culture and the Humanities 2008; 4:1-2 EDITORIAL I am very pleased that this issue of LCH contains a symposium on The Court of Shakespeare. This ingeniously constructed exercise in crossing boundaries between law and literature powerfully illustrates several important problematics - among them the problematics of textual inter- pretation and judgment. Acknowledging the ways in which the Court of Shakespeare differs from courts of law in the real world, Desmond Manderson, the organizer of this symposium, says, It is certainly true that the enforcement of law is an intrinsic part of how we experience it, and the 'Court of Shakespeare' has no enforcement apparatus at all. To say this is, of course, not to denigrate the wonderfully imaginative work presented in this issue. It is, instead, to situate it and, in an ethically responsible manner, call our attention to the gap that exists when legal scholars forget the violence that accompanies acts of legal judgment. This forgetting is, I fear, all too common. As Robert Cover observes, despite its significance, law's violence has played little role, and occupied little space, in legal theory and jurisprudence.1 Or when it is present, awareness of the violence done or authorized by officials is divorced from the violence of interpretation, as if the act of speaking or writing the words of law could be separated from the inscription of those words of the bodies of citizens. This absence and this divorce have serious consequences since the fate of law is inexorably tied up with the fate of legal theory. By failing to confront law's lethal character and the masking of its interpretive violence, legal theory tacitly encourages officials to ignore the bloody consequences of their authoritative acts and the pain those acts produce. Moreover, by equating the conditions of legal legitimacy with that mask- ing much of jurisprudence promotes righteous indifference and allows law's violence to continue unabated. While I am neither so idealistic nor so naive as to imagine that a change in legal theory would in itself end bloodletting done, authorized or approved by legal institutions and offi- cials, I want to urge scholars of law, culture, and the humanities to inter- rogate legal theory in order to understand how law, surrounded by so much pain, is, nonetheless, able to maintain its calm, bureaucratic facade. This ought to be a perennial question of legal theory, but unfortu- nately, it is not. Neither traditional nor critical jurisprudence have come to terms with the fact that the business of law is, when everything else is said and done, a violent one, that the violence of legal interpretation is a preface to the use of physical force, that law, to borrow Cover's stunning 1. Violence and the Word, 95 Yale LawJournal (1986), 1601. © 2008Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities 10. 117711743872108091088

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