Peter Goodrich
Biographic Data
| ID | 279049 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Peter Goodrich |
| GIVEN NAMES | Peter |
| FAMILY NAME | Goodrich |
| SIGNATURE | GOODRICH P |
| AFFILIATIONS | New York Law School |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-8013-5850 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 78 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 90 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 75 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1978 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Professor Tomlins as . . . Contemporary
A contribution to a festschrift for Professor Christopher Tomlins, this essay will laud the name of Tomlins – a variant of Thomas – and then follow a recent trajectory in his thought, the pursuit of the contemporary.
Jest, Gesture, Dance and Law
Occursus: An Introduction to My Ghosts
The present occursus is a collection of amicable essays and a somewhat erumpent desire on my part both to escape and in doing so to thank those who have so generously and variously hobbled, impaled, expanded, dissected, tracked, uplifted, gouged, wounded, excited and obliquely improved upon the limitations of my scribblings. I am variously, to take the more exotic appellations, a mouse, an infected space, a heterosocialite, a crow with an arrow t…
Perpetuum mobile: Colour, sound and motion
The prison house of language, the penitentiary of print, as also the practices of precedent all encourage a degree of recidivism, of default repetition and so it not surprising that photograph and film are apprehended initially as being like texts and needing to the read. Visual literacy is frequently invoked as the desired state and method of looking and training the legal gaze. The point to be stressed is that in analytic and critical terms the…
On Our LastLeges
Common law is predicated historically upon a sense of the common, of custom and use time out of mind. The legal tradition has its roots in a guild, an elite community whose common opinion and conversations provided the substance and sensibility of the normative. Remediation of law, meaning here the changing media of legal transmission, the imaginal turn in the streamed and viral relays of law and its enforcement, confront a monochrome and linear …
Casting spectres
Megalithic monuments to colonial rule, the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras tower over their respective cityscapes. What do such anachronic and anachronistic architectural presences mean for the populace? How do these looming stones inform the indigenous practice of contemporary law? What sensibility of jurist and the juridical do these lapidary structures inculcate, impose or instil? For Khorakiwala, their khora, tone or reverberations…
Transhumusians: On The Jurisography of the Corpus Iuris
Transhumusians:On The Jurisography of the Corpus Iuris Peter Goodrich (bio) The image of beginning is the beginning of the image. It is marked as the central sign on the body, the fulcrum point of the stomach, the apex of the libidinal tensor of the skin. The navel, those forgotten folds, the umbilical ring, is the dark precursor, the sign of severance of attachment depicted in the point at which the ducta venosa, the bloody vein that carried new…
Retinal Justice: Rats, Maps, and Masks
A judge springs out of his car on the way to court in downtown Chicago and takes photographs of an inflatable rat. A while later he inserts these photographs into a decision involving another inflatable rodent. Judges now regularly insert pictures in judgments, but there is no study either of the genres or the precedential status of these modern visual emblemata, these pictorial interventions in the record. Using a comparative visual corpus of ov…
Administering Interpretation: Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law
Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and Anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the ar…
Inutilious Propaedeutics: Performances in Theatre and Law
Law and New Media: West of Everything
Examines the complex and varied interactions between law and the different visual media produced by changing technologies In this volume, international specialists from new and established domains of law, media, film and virtual studies address the emergence of the jurist in the era of digital transmission. Examining the jurisprudence of new visual technologies – from the cinema of the early twentieth century to the social media of our own time –…
Administering Interpretation: Derrida, Agamben, and the Political Theology of Law
Populism in politics and policy orientations in law have thrown the jurisdiction of the academy and the disciplines of interpretation into disarray. Critique flounders in abstraction and negativity, law loses itself in particularity. Administering Interpretation brings together philosophers, humanists, and jurists from both continental and anglophone jurisdictions to reassess the status and trajectory of interpretative theory as applied in the ar…
Introduction: West of Everything
Faces and Frames of Government
Heretical Archives: Heterotopic Institutions and Fictive Records
The archive is in significant part the melancholic record of death. It harbours coffins, tombs and tomes. An image, first, of an untimely death. Part of a personal archive, the record of time long since spent. Shards of a history that did not happen. A shadow. A shade. Dr Ewan Maclean, a figure of encyclopedic learning and aesthetic inclinations, did his doctorate on art forgery. I knew him, and I had admired his knowledge and his thesis while st…
Veritie hidde: Amity, law, miscellany
The choral character of the academy, the bark of fashion and the other signs of the times register dimly a species of collective affect to research and writing. The offices of the academic include amity and its attendant aspirations of altruism, loyalty and selflessness but these intimate interiors of intellect are seldom if ever acknowledged, let alone analysed. Starting from the symptomatic text of a failed epistolary intimacy and abandoned pro…
How Strange the Change from Major to Minor
The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous title to an excavation of the ontology of the minor. Associated theologically with the abrogation of all law, the minor is the child, play, the modal chord that challenges, subverts and displaces the certainty of the major key and black letter law. A minor jurisprudence is argued here to be a lifestyle that challenges the extant legal form of office, th…
Proboscations: Excavations in Comedy and Law
Procedere ad nasoHand on the tiller, to steady my course, to think by stroking my Anglican Jewish nose, but what unthinkable stupidity lies in the demographics of prow and profile, the faux chorographies of our nostrilated dance. A physiognomy of proboscises is a preposterousness that merits momentary and melancholic elucubration because, lamentable to behold, it has been tried by a variety of undersnouted intellects.16 That historical chain of p…
The International Signs Law
This chapter argues for the image as a medium for communicating the method and norms of a rather abstract, primary, and primordial jurisdiction at work during the early seventeenth-century empires. The beginnings of international law therefore are expressed in the earliest markings, patterns, rhythms, and signs that delineate human inhabitation and community. The chapter posits that the law has entered the secular world in the form of arms — symb…
Ex Cathedra Iuris
The Judge’s Two Bodies: The Case of Daniel Paul Schreber
The Scene of the Mass Crime: History, Film, and International Tribunals
"Takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genoc…
Visiocracy: On the Futures of the Fingerpost
The Theatre of Emblems: On the Optical Apparatus and the Investiture of Persons
The concept of the person is linked most often, within the Western tradition, to the theatre. The etymology of the word goes back to the actor's mask and thence to the stage and by extension to the great unraveling of public life that occurs within the variegated histrionic domains of the social. Lawyers borrowed from and competed with the theatre. Acting, the adoption of roles, the scrivening of instruments, the collection of books, the staging …
Disciplines and Jurisdictions: An Historical Note
Research Article| September 01 2010 Disciplines and Jurisdictions: An Historical Note Peter Goodrich Peter Goodrich Cardozo School of Law [email protected] Peter Goodrich currently writes on law and the visual. His last book was The Laws of Love: A Brief Historical and Practical Manual (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007). His most recent essays have been on legal enigmas, juristic emblems, and visual advocacy. His feature documentary, Auf Wiedersehen—‘Til w…
Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis
Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. Legal Discourse provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and `legalese' more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sig…
Law and Language: An Historical and Critical Introduction
The Critic’s Love of The Law: Intimate Observations on an Insular Jurisdiction
Specula laws: Image, aesthetic and common law
The Theatre of Emblems: On the Optical Apparatus and the Investiture of Persons
The concept of the person is linked most often, within the Western tradition, to the theatre. The etymology of the word goes back to the actor's mask and thence to the stage and by extension to the great unraveling of public life that occurs within the variegated histrionic domains of the social. Lawyers borrowed from and competed with the theatre. Acting, the adoption of roles, the scrivening of instruments, the collection of books, the staging …
Poor Illiterate Reason: History, Nationalism and Common Law
By long use and custom men, especially that are aged and have been long educated in the profession and practice of the law, contract a kind of superstitious veneration of it beyond what is just and reasonable. (Hale, 1787: 264)
Introduction to the theory of the image: Narcissus and the other in the mirror
Proboscations: Excavations in Comedy and Law
Procedere ad nasoHand on the tiller, to steady my course, to think by stroking my Anglican Jewish nose, but what unthinkable stupidity lies in the demographics of prow and profile, the faux chorographies of our nostrilated dance. A physiognomy of proboscises is a preposterousness that merits momentary and melancholic elucubration because, lamentable to behold, it has been tried by a variety of undersnouted intellects.16 That historical chain of p…
Tristes Juristes
Identity Politics and the Law in the United States
Social Science and the Displacement of Law
W. T. Murphy, The Oldest Social Science? Configurations of Law Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii + 269 pp. $60.00. In one of his lesser known fictions, Utopia of a Tired Man, Borges (1982) depicted the paradoxical image of a distant sparsely populated society in which individuals could choose the time of their death. If one could live as long as one wished, then the moment of was not to be determined by political, economic, …
Rhetoric, grammatology and the hidden injuries of law
The accepted form of rhetorical analysis of law has traditionally applied a rhetorical order of argument and a variety of figures drawn from forensic rhetoric to the construction and analysis of legal discourse. The project is a scholastic one and endeavours to find the appropriate terms and style of both cause and proof. The present paper argues for an inversion of that relationship between the disciplines of rhetoric and law. Here law is used t…
Alexy Ad Iustitium
The Importance of Being Earnest: Satire and the Criticism of Law
Even Coke joked. His humour, however, has not been taken up by commentators. Even less so his satirical allusions. It is but one instance of the way in which the humorous genre of satire has been almost completely ignored by jurists. They find it threatening, they don't know what to do with it, and it infracts antique norms of ecclesiastical dogma that common law has yet to properly examine. This article elicits the historical and theoretical rea…
A Fragment on Cnutism with Brief Divagations on the Philosophy of the Near Miss
This fragment is taken, mid‐sentence as it were, from a longer discourse. It is plucked in process from a discussion of friendship for ideas. It is part of a longer journey through the annals of amity. The fragment also examines a fragment, a gloss on a text, a marginal comment, a handwritten note, which is taken to constitute the modern origin of Cnutism
The Perspective Law of the Ego: Public Intellectuals and the Economy of Diffuse Returns
The article critiques Richard Posner's analysis of the decline of public intellectuals, arguing that Posner's focus on short-term media visibility and immediate impact overlooks the structural and long-term influence of intellectual work. It posits that the true measure of intellectual impact lies in the diffuse transmission of ideas through academia and the broader cultural landscape, rather than in media presence or short-term predictions
Distrust Quotations in Latin
Signs Taken for Wonders: Community, Identity, and A History of Sumptuary Law
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Signs Taken for Wonders: "Community, Identity, and "A History of Sumptuary Law
A Comment on Williams' and Wilson's Analysis of the 1976 U.S. Election
Law and Language: An Historical and Critical Introduction
The Role of Linguistics in Legal Analysis
Dialectic of Nihilism: Post-Structuralism and Law
This book fundamentally challenges the radical credentials of post--structuralism. Though Derrida, Foucault and Deleuze claim to have a deconstructeda metaphysics, their work has much in common with previous attempts to a enda the metaphysical tradition, from Kant to Nietzshe and Heidegger, and by sociology in general. Gillian Rose shows that this anti--metaphysical writing always appears in historically specific jurisprudential terms, which them…
Law and Modernity
Literacy and the Languages of the Early Common Law
The most famous of the libraries of antiquity was a collection of manuscripts brought together by the first of the Ptolemies in the third century B.C. in Alexandria. This apogee of antique literary science2 brought together under one roof the Museion - some 500,000 manuscripts and an academy of scholars dedicated to systematic philological research. In the form of a cult organisation under a priest of the Muses, the Alexandrian library produced a…
Contractions
Peter Goodrich undertakes a postmodernist deconstruction of the modernist daims to autonomy of analytical and pure theories of law as contract as indicated by Rousseau. The autonomy of law must suppose a repressive starting point or foundation. Considering the Social Contract alongside the Essay on the Origin of Language, also by Rousseau, Goodrich draws out Derridean themes of ghostly memory and obsessive repetition to expose what the pretended …
The Decay of International Law? A Reappraisal of the Limits of Legal Imagination in International Affairs
The Law as a System of Signs
Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric and Legal Analysis
Lawyers and the law have long been the object of popular criticism and satire for the obscurity and incomprehensibility of their language. Legal Discourse provides a novel historical and systematic account of the language of the legal institution together with a sustained criticism of legal exegesis and `legalese' more generally. In the first part of the work the doctrinal history of the legal discipline and its concepts of language, text and sig…
Rhetoric, grammatology and the hidden injuries of law
The accepted form of rhetorical analysis of law has traditionally applied a rhetorical order of argument and a variety of figures drawn from forensic rhetoric to the construction and analysis of legal discourse. The project is a scholastic one and endeavours to find the appropriate terms and style of both cause and proof. The present paper argues for an inversion of that relationship between the disciplines of rhetoric and law. Here law is used t…
We Orators
Specula laws: Image, aesthetic and common law
Eating law: Commons, common land, common law
(1991). Eating law: Commons, common land, common law. The Journal of Legal History: Vol. 12, No. 3, pp. 246-267
Poor Illiterate Reason: History, Nationalism and Common Law
By long use and custom men, especially that are aged and have been long educated in the profession and practice of the law, contract a kind of superstitious veneration of it beyond what is just and reasonable. (Hale, 1787: 264)
Writing legal difference: Helena Kennedy's eve was framed: Women and British justice and Luce Irigaray's J'aime à toi: Equisse d'une félicité dans l'histoire
Gynaetopia: Feminine Genealogies of Common Law
In order to make an ethics of sexual difference possible, it is necessary to retrace the ties of feminine genealogies ... at the levels of law, religion, language, truth and wisdom ... [l]t is necessary to introduce into the history of reason an interpretation of the forgetting of feminine genealogies and thereby re-establish their economy.•Criticisms of law and of the legal profession from feminine perspectives considerably pre-date the various …
Salem and Bizance: A short history of the two laws
Law in the Courts of Love: Andreas Capellanus and the Judgments of Love
Introduction to the theory of the image: Narcissus and the other in the mirror
Law and Iconomics
Criminology and the Aesthetic of Feminine Disappearance
Young, Alison Imaging Crime: Textual Outlaws and Criminal Conversations
Signs Taken for Wonders: Community, Identity, and A History of Sumptuary Law
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Signs Taken for Wonders: "Community, Identity, and "A History of Sumptuary Law
Social Science and the Displacement of Law
W. T. Murphy, The Oldest Social Science? Configurations of Law Modernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. xii + 269 pp. $60.00. In one of his lesser known fictions, Utopia of a Tired Man, Borges (1982) depicted the paradoxical image of a distant sparsely populated society in which individuals could choose the time of their death. If one could live as long as one wished, then the moment of was not to be determined by political, economic, …
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