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14 L. & Critique 1 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq14 and id is 1 raw text is: SIOBHAN HOLOHAN and MARK FEATHERSTONE* MULTICULTURALISM, INSTITUTIONAL LAW, AND IMAGINARY JUSTICE ABSTRACT. Following Le Pen's relative success in the French presidential vote and the British National Party's historic return in our own 2002 local elections, the article considers the prospects for the production of more communicative race relations in contemporary Britain. To this end we reassess the media's treatment of the Stephen Lawrence case and explore the political logic of the Macpherson report, the policy document which followed the apparent miscarriage of justice that allowed Lawrence's alleged killers to walk free. In terms of our analysis of the media we are concerned to show how the real of Britain's ordinary racism was hidden behind an ideology of multiculturalism that scapegoated singular individuals to cover for the structural inequalities of wider society. The article aims to show how the media upheld the notion of objective justice that institutional law was apparently unable to secure. But while the media supported the ideology of the law, its exposure of the failings of institutional law also led to calls for legal reform to guarantee the realisation of institutional justice. Although we accept that the attempt to achieve legal totality is impossible, our argument is that the critique of legal objectivity, which takes in subjective rights claims, may present the possibility for the realisation of a novel, inclusive, model of race relations. That is to say that although the media supports the ideology of the law, the fact that this support requires a critique of practical law forces the law to modernise around the idealistic demands of its own ideological structure. Akin to Douzinas,1 who has argued for the endless expansion of rights as post-modern utopianism, we believe that this process of modernisation, which is arranged to maintain the status quo through minimal reform, is the condition of possibility of a more inclusive system of race relations. KEY WORDS: Stephen Lawrence, Macpherson report, media representation, multi- culturalism, objective law, psychoanalysis, race relations, recognition, scapegoat mech- anism, subjective critique 1. INTRODUCTION In recent times Britain's emergence as a multicultural state has been ques- tioned by the trial of two Leeds United footballers, Lee Bowyer and 1 See C. Douzinas, The End of Human Rights: Critical Legal Thought at the Turn of the Century (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000). * We would like to thank John O'Neill for his continued support and Youssef Yacoubi at The University of Nottingham's Postgraduate Centre for Critical Theory and Cultural Studies for allowing Siobhan Holohan to present an earlier version of this article at the 'Representations of Violence and Violence of Representations' conference of September, 2000. LA Law and Critique 14: 1-27, 2003. O © 2003 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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