Law by Night [Hardcover]

InLaw by NightJonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and “take back the night” rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law’s nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night’s potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.USJonathan Goldberg-Hiller explores the limits of modern legal theory in regards to the night and the possibility for both violence and freedom that might be otherwise unavailable during the day.Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa, coeditor ofPlastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, also published by Duke University Press, and author ofThe Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights.“Bringing a highly sophisticated theoretical mind to a richly woven thick description of legal practices, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks how our conceptions of law would change if we thought about it from a metaphor of darkness. Throughout this fascinating and thought-provoking book, he attends to how public imaginaries of darkness are affected by race and gender and how the law of the dark has an ambiguous relation to human freedom and security. As he demonstrates, the law is obscure, complex, and lacks transparency&mda