Law, Obligation, Community

Description

Against an ever-expanding and diversifying ‘rights talk’, this book re-opens the question of obligation from not only legal but also ethical, sociological and political perspectives. Its premise is that obligation has a primacy ahead of rights, because rights attach to practices and modes of being that are already saturated with obligations. Obligations thus lie at the core not just of law but of community. Yet the distinctive meanings, range and situations of obligation have tended to remain under-theorised in legal scholarship. In response, this book examines the sense in which we are multiply ‘bound beings’, to law and legal institutions, as much as we are to place, community, memory and the various social institutions that give shape to collective life. Sharing this set of concerns, each of the international group of scholars contributing to this volume traces the specificity of the binding force of obligations, their techniques and modes of expression, as well as their centrally important role in giving form to lawful relations. Together they provide an innovative and challenging contribution to legal scholarship: one that will also be of relevance to those working in politics, philosophy and social theory. Cover Half Title Title Page Copyright Page Table of Contents List of figures List of contributors Introduction References PART I: The priority of obligations 1. Dogma, or the deep rootedness of obligation Dogma and critique Attention, fragility and obligation The work of dogma as resource Bibliography 2. Why should I listen to my conscience? Equity and the question of ontological obligation Introduction Equitable obligation Obligation and ontology Sharing obligation: a categorical imperative Obligation and violence Bibliography 3. The origin of obligations: towards a fundamental phenomenology of legal and moral obligation Introduction I. Expanding the scope of Hohfeldian rights–duties correlatives through constitutional law II. The possibility of the ‘priority of obligation ahead of right’ considered through a reading of Mauss III. The gift of time IV. The categorical divide and the categorical imperative V. Why is the duty to give a duty? VI. Post-Hohfeldian legal duties to give freely? Bibliography PART II: Instituting obligations 4. On the company’s bounded sense of social obligation Overview Recesses Surfaces, voids Sediments Conclusion Bibliography 5. Duty free Introduction Follow the money: now you see it, now you don’t There’s no such thing as a ‘free’ market Immunity and its implications The asymmetries of austerity Conclusion Bibliography 6. History, alterity and obligation: toward a genealogy of the co-operative Co-operation, community and history A genealogical approach Constituting the co-operative Conclusion Bibliography 7. Sovereignty, affect and being-bound Affective attachments The limits of sovereignty Being-bound/becoming-minor Being-bound/becoming-undone Conclusion Bibliography PART III: The forces of obligations 8. Hybrid legalities: on obligation and law’s immanent materiology Untimely mediations The missing mass of legality Democracy and materiology Bibliography 9. The biographical core of law: privacy, personhood, and the bounds of obligation Law’s drawing hands Privacy, personhood, and the normativity of law Two challenges to human subjectivity The character of hesitation The passage of law through persons The biographical core of law Bibliography PART IV: Civility, office and the bonds of community 10. Civility, obligation and criminal law Civility, civil society and the criminal law Civility, obligation and the criminal law Civility and obligation Bibliography 11. Obligations of office Offices and persons Jurisprudents of Australia Conclusion Acknowledgements Bibliography 12. Academic freedom academic obligation Carrol Clarkson [email protected] Carrol Clarkson [email protected] Daniel Matthews and Scott Veitch [email protected] Bibliography Index