 We'll do all of the introductions and acknowledgments at the very beginning of the conference. We decided to sort of sprint them out a little bit. So at this point, it's my great pleasure to introduce our benefactor, so to speak, our benefactor and chief, our Winship R&C Dean of West Devon's Law School, who has really done so much to help us make this event possible. Are we? Thank you so much. It's a wonderful community. I have the chance to welcome you. I know that you're here to listen to the panel. I know that no one comes to a conference to listen to the dean's welcome. So I promise to be very agreed. I think we have a chance to create a very special law school here at the University of California program. And this conference is so integral to what we want to be, bringing people together from around the country from a number of different disciplines, really look and cutting edge work. I'd be remiss if I didn't thank the two people who are most responsible for this, Chris Tomlens and Catherine Desi. This is an amazing conference. I'm so grateful to you and we have a law school for planning it. Also, an enormous amount of logistical work goes into a conference like this. So I also want to thank Mary Jermaine and Laurie Burke for our staff for all the planning they did and all of their hard work. Now, one tribute to the success of this conference is its size. We don't yet have a room within the law school, largely as a whole group of this size. But I hope that tomorrow afternoon at the end of the conference, we'll come to the reception. We'll give you a tour of our existing facilities and there's a lot more construction going on. We'll show you the dean. Most of all, I'll chance personally to give you a tour of the library and show you the law school that we're building. There's others who are involved here on campus. One of the things that is distinct about our law school is our close relationships with many of the schools and units on campus. We want to be interdisciplinary from the very beginning. And so what I want to do is now turn this over to another post-sponsor of the conference, Professor Mom Lynch. She's the director of the Center of Law, Society and Culture, professor of the School of Social Ecology. It would be wonderful if you had us into a welcome. Hi, everybody. I too am thrilled about the law school here and about this conference. It's really amazing. I know about Chris and it was working his butt off getting this to happen, but it's really an amazing group of people that he brought together. And from the other side of campus, the non-law school side of campus, we are just in heaven with the scholars that have come here both as now our permanent faculty and then the people that they are bringing in to share with the campus. So it's really a wonderful time at UCI for interdisciplinary law and society scholarship. We feel very strongly about forging in these interdisciplinary bonds and our center and the center in law, society and culture is truly an interdisciplinary endeavor. We have members from every unit on campus who are either faculty affiliates or on our board and who come to our events and participate. So when we heard about this conference being planned last year, Catherine shared it with us. We thought, oh, we've got to get on board with that. Can we play a part? Can we at least be involved in it? So we're really excited about doing that. And thank you so much for all of you for participating and for being here. Thanks. I should just add, one of the things that the center in law society and culture made a really important material contribution because the center helped us fund the attendance of a number of graded students who probably could not otherwise have been here. We also had graded student assistants from the University of California as Humanities Research Institute. And so I especially want to thank David Theogolberg, the Institute's director for that support. David would like to have been here here somewhere in Europe at the moment, and so it could not be, but we owe both the center and the Humanities Research Institute many thanks for their support. And now, Orvator Ariel. Hi everybody, I want to, it's my pleasure to introduce the panel on Law, History, and Culture. So I'm just going to introduce the speakers to you briefly, I'm sure many of you know all of them or know them by their work, through their work. Peter Grigrich is Professor of Law and Director of Law and Humanities at Targozo School of Law. He was the founding dean of the Department of Law at Burkbeck College, University of London. He was also the Corporation of London Professor of Law. Professor Grigrich is an expert on Law, Love, and Friendship. He's written extensively in the areas of Law and Literature, Legal History, and Theory. His most recent book is Laws of Love, a Brief Historical and Practical Manual. Shia Levite is the Director of the Minerva Center of Human Rights and teaches Law at Tel Aviv Faculty of Law. His book, The Modern Art of Dying, the History of Youth in Asia in the United States, won the 2006 Distinguished Book Award and Sociology of Law from the American Sociology Association. He's also visited at Toronto University, at Berkeley, at Humboldt University in Berlin, and he's currently working on the history of Jews and Muslims in Germany, focusing on the debate on animals, law and ritual. I wonder if I should be telling you their titles, but maybe they will. Asaf Nukhavsky, also from Tel Aviv University, was visiting this year at the UCLA School of Law. He has published on Legal History, Taxation, Heritage Law, and Sociology of Law. His book, Law and Identity in Mandate Palestine, was a co-winner of the 2006 Shapiro Book Award for the best book in Israel Studies. He has directed the Sagla Center for Introduce when I Research at Tel Aviv University, and he edited the journal, The Red Booking Brace in Law for several years. Roger Berkowitz, at the end of the panel, is Assistant Professor of Political Studies and Human Rights at Bard College. He is not a JD as well as PhD, from UC Berkeley. He's written a number of books, but it's recently, The Gift of Science, Lightness, and a Modern Legal Tradition, an account of how the rise of science has led to the divorce of law and justice in 2005. He edited a special issue, Law, Culture, and Humanities, entitled Revenge and Justice. And as you can tell from this paper, he's interested in Nietzsche and Heidegger, and a number of philosophers of science and justice. So they will each speak to us about their papers for 25 minutes, and then we'll have our short break and come back and discuss the papers, things. My first? You are. Okay, very exciting. Well, first off, every event has some species of trope or figure or theme, and for me, it's undoubtedly Chris Tomlin's performing the noble enactment of the paper of someone who wasn't here as if they were here. And I would say that I'm not going to read my paper, but if I were, I would have definitely passed the job over to Chris Tomlin, so he could spare you the horrors of an English accent and the slowness with which we swallow our consonants. But I'm going to, because I believe there's a certain figure or image that's important to perform my paper orally. Having said that, of course, it would be much better if Chris Tomlin's performed it orally, but we cannot ask him to do that. Picking up on the previous panel, there was much talk of speech acts, and one of the reasons that I think it's important to talk, and I'll wander at various points, is precisely because there is an element of performativity. And speech acting never forget is speech acting as well as speech act, and it's in that theatricality in the acting out that we can come to get a little bit of a sense of the problematic that I want to talk about today, which is why the history of the legal spectacle has never been written. Now, I've been working in visual advocacy. We're surrounded by the visual, the virtual, the imagistic, and I want to talk mainly about why this is the history of the image of law, the visual representation of law has never been written. And to try and suggest through a number of examples that it has a growing significance and importance. And although this is merely history, although this is simply a reflection upon the past and in good Harvard style, because I'm interested in it, it's nonetheless the case that I think it has a significant and growing purchase, and I will pretend to a little bit of relevance, both strategic and tactical. So, I'm gonna make three points. Students at Kadozak Law School, the Shiba University, they often say this obsession with three points is playing for the wrong team, but it's simply the polytheism of monotheism that I want to draw your attention to. And I want to look to and reflect upon how it is that law manipulates and uses the image. Under one reigning rubric, if I might, a little bit of Latin, there's a baroque maxim that seems to me important today, increasingly so, and that has been written about with incredible philological erudition by Giorgio Agamben, and his work lies very much at the back. His recent work, which I mistranslate as Power and the Glory, that's just because I grew up with Anglican priest as my father, I mean proper translation, the Renier de la Loire, Kingdom and Glory, that misses out the interlinking. So, the maxim is Rex Regnat, Sednon, Gubernat, and I think that's been coming up time and time again today. The sovereign rules that the sovereign doesn't govern. There's an ellipse, there's a gap, there's an antinomic relationship between the two, and within that antinomic dependency, I replaced the image, the angelogical, the hymnological, the acclamatory that allows that antinomic dependence, that passage that is also resistance. So, three points, because of course there always have to be. So, my first point is just that lawyers and my therapist keeps reminding me don't insult your audience, and a lot of you will be lawyers, but lawyers are perhaps not the most visual of creatures, and there are interesting surveys of congenital eye deficiency in different professions, and lawyers always come out first as having been born short-sighted, generally it's myopia, and having formed their personalities prior to receiving corrective spectacles. So, their world is built around rules that do not require actually seeing what you're dealing with. So, there is a resistance, there is a sense in which the legal profession, and I'll talk to this for a bit, has a fear and an antinomic dependency, a hostility as well as a dependence upon images, and I'd suggest that that dependency is at the level of structure, and it should be understood in terms of the classic figure of dissimulation that they're necessary, but they should not be or their dependencies should not be too evident. So, my next point is, and this is just in case I forget, or I get distracted, or Ariel that stops me as she undies me well. So, my next point will be that there is a reason for that legal hostility, and that reason is embedded deep in common law, and is jurisdictional. In other words, the reason that lawyers don't deal with images is not that they can't see the legal spectacle because they need spectacles, it's simply as an English joke because you talk about glasses. We talk about spectacles, that's how you correct. But the reason is that the economy or the iconocratic, the visual, was always part of the ecclesiastical jurisdiction that was annexed to common law. So, there is a sense in which lawyers never had the training, lawyers were only currently having to learn and tool and equip, and that is by virtue of a jurisdiction that was annexed but never in any methodical sense in incorporated or internalized. And then the last point, final marker, would be that along with this jurisdictional incapacity or inability, there's a really deep dependency upon the image for the promulgation and the dissemination of law. There's a sense in which the images is everywhere, the spectacular is everywhere, far more so than the word. And that spectacularity of law, homo spectabilis or super illustrious or whatever the books, there is a history of the legal use of images, the just imaginum. But what's really surprising to modernize in relation to that is that the legal use of images is all to do with the order of precedence and the modes of eminence and honor. To be seen is to be ennobled, is to be aggrandized, is to form part of the hierarchy, a hierarchy quite explicitly modeled upon the angelogical hierarchy on a immunological coral and a planetary mode, which we find in the Intercourt and we find elsewhere. So let me start if I... So lawyers and the visual, let me start with the case because we like cases. When Dan Bryan was sued for copyright infringement in relation to his book, The Da Vinci Code, in the English Court of Chancery, the dispute was not in any substantive sense, a significant one, although it was, in many respects, highly amusing in its content. But there's just a little typographical feature to the eventual judgment that was completely missed by those to whom it was handed down. What we have here is a PDF, a perfume distraction, Fuchus, of the first page of the judgment. Judgment handed down had certain peculiarities. So I say and I show this to my students and they generally don't see it, but what do they see? Take them to the law library, do they see the portraits of the deans that hang over them? I wouldn't beware, they overlook them as they are overlooked by them. So they have no idea they're there. I perform many experiments, but here if you look closely, there are a number of randomly italicized and emboldened letters in the course of the judgment. This is just the first one. So the S of claimants, the air of claimants in the second paragraph. And so we go on, the sea of cynicism rather nicely, just subsequently. So what do we to make of that? The judge using the Fiminacci code, which had been subject matter of the winning novel in the dispute, had embedded a code in the judgment. And that code, when translated into the vernacular, made up the following sentence, which was Smithy code, who are you, Jackie Fisher? Dreadnought. Let me say two things. Number one, this wasn't noticed. It was not really seen. It was only because the judge started emailing members of his audience that anybody realized that there was this peculiarity because we don't read very closely. We read the text as if we're seeing through it. We don't see it as a visual device, as itself an image. The second point is that the Court of Appeal had to mention it when the case went to appeal. And the Court of Appeal determination was very brief, but they said that it was unfortunate basically that the judge had embedded this code in the judgment. They said, nothing turns on it. Next sentence, one space of separation. The judgment is difficult to read and hard to understand. In other words, far from being insignificant, it had a heavily negative connotation, which I, of course, in a piece I won't talk about here have proven to be precisely not the case. In other words, Dreadnought and Jackie Fisher stand in the same relation as Dan Brown and the Dillinger Code. You have there what classically would be called a device with an S. You have an image of a judgment. Dreadnought was the new big gun ship, which sunk everything else until juggling, and then it got sunk, but you can't account for German form. But it was a big hit for a while, but it had been designed not by Jackie Fisher, who was the English Admiral, who was accredited with it. It was actually designed by Vittorio Cuniverti some time before, an Italian naval architect, and Jackie Fisher had taken the design. So the party that enacts, the party that performs, the party that successfully produces, the party that is the winner, is the winner, is basically the logic of that decision. And I think that properly enunciates the position of Justice Smith, the author of the code, in relation to the copyright infringement case. So there are certain differences, but he really liked fiction. It has a special attractiveness, it's a sphinx-like. And even at a certain point, he says, a legal judgment is not I hope a fiction, which is a classic or a torrical definition, meaning he really hopes that it's as good as a fiction. And on and on, I could take you much further. But that's the Da Vinci Code case, and it has a significance more than anything else. For me, in this context, in that it shows us that these words are not simply words. The common law has never treated these words as simply words. There's something more going on, and it's not something more going on that I want to move towards. But just before we leave the blindness of lawyers, because I love finding things that other people haven't found, and showing them things that they can't see, thus wetting their appetite, I hope. But here, batami annos juris prulencia. We're very used to seeing your stitia blindfolded. We're very used as lawyers to saying, oh, justice is blindfolded. But law is evident, open, and there to be seen. And O has a picture here of justitia on a pedestal. Always justice, law is coming from above. The book is quite open. The book is a perfect sign. Sit liba eudex, which is the relevant maxim. Let the book decide. That's the theorem. Here it is, coming from above. So often you will see stars splashing down on the text and radiance emanating out. But underneath, underneath, the lawyers and the politicians are blindfolded. It's the audience that's blindfolded. I'm sorry, this is taken doubtless without permission from Gallica from the French National Library website, and it's not of the highest quality, but I show the law review that when they get hold of it, it will be in 786 pixelations. So it is visible, I can assure you, when I look at it in its miniaturized form, they're all blindfolded. So what's the point? What's the relationship of law to the image? And the answer is partly that law should look with downcast eyes, also that lawyers should internalize and that lawyers should learn to see, be brought to see. But the point initially for me is simply that the lawyers are removed from the image. The lawyers cannot see. And then today, we don't normally see lawyers wandering around with blindfolds. They're wearing spectacles. So we have to undo that metaphoricity, but to undo a metaphoricity, we need first to understand it and to understand that there is a tradition that clearly depicts the lawyers as blindfolded and justice as all seen. Let us move then just to a last point about the words of the law. If you look at the common law sources around this time, Plowden and the like, you will see that they talk about words as images. Words are images of intention. Words are the impressed or vestige. Words are signs, and this of course comes from a long theological Christian tradition in which we see the words. That's what the sacrament is, the visible word. We did that vocance. We see the promulgation of law. We see the text. It's an image, and it refers in the manner of a relic or vestige or as they call it an impress or device. It's the tip of an iceberg, but truth is a mark left by an absconded or absent source. That is the Christian position. That's what you find in Coak and in others. Look at the beginning of the institutes, and I'm sure you never have. There are a number of pictures. Two pictures in particular are important. One is the law book on a cushion with a cross in front of it, sword and arms. For God, for sovereign, for you, in Latin underneath, because the sovereign always speaks Latin. And then in Plowden and so on, we find exactly the same thing. These words are simply references in Coak. It's not the words, but the truth is to be loved. Non-werevers said veritas as the manner. It's behind, it's beyond, it's referential. So why have lawyers treated the book as both silent and invisible in aesthetic or visual terms? And the answer I suggest is tied up in this notion of the sovereign ruling, but not governing. The jurisdictional issue, of course, fond to the English, less fond to the US that inherited that law. The jurisdictional issue is that in the 1530s, Henry VIII asked the two universities, whether the Roman Pontiff had greater power and force than any other external bishop and the universities understandably, caring for their necks, said none whatsoever, Henry, oh boy. So Henry took it all. So look at the law dictionary, the Einigmata Juris from 1506, and it has a dual definition of iconomus and iconomus. Iconomus is the ecclesiastical jurisdiction that governs the visible realm. That is iconocracy, physiocracy, the listed order of images. Iconomus, and we've been mentioning Janus, that's the administrative realm. And the administrative realm, where you do what you want, because your father or the family, generally speaking, the economic realm, which again when writes a great deal about, that forgotten realm, is the realm where things are actually done, the realm of practice, a realm that is separate from the economic. The lawyers did not inherit that in the best of manners. If you look at the late 17th century texts on the two laws, ecclesiastical and civil, you find the ordinary Gadolfin talking about how we simply don't understand common law, if we don't understand its theological basis. It is the insignificant and disfigured ciphers, if you haven't understood the question that Henry VIII asked at the universities, and so on and so on. So the best that you find from the Commendan case, I didn't see one of it, five minutes, my lord, I'm only on the first point. Okay, well I'll speed up. So the Commendan case, it's one of the florist's quite faculent coroner. This jurisdiction becomes part of the sovereign aura and rule. One of the flowers of the crown, and that's a fascinating word to unpack, what are the florists of rhetoric, of dictionaries, of Inigmata as Nibriha, the author of the Inigmata Eurus book. So there we stand, and if you want an illustration of that curious duality, that's a great case. Thomas and the state of Mississippi from not long ago, Thomas was pulled up before Judge Guest, what a great name, for having failed to pay a parking suspension fine, license suspension fine. When he was brought before the judge, the judge informed him that he was also charged with public profanity. The judge proceeded to try him for public profanity, find him guilty and find him. On his way out of the court, Thomas said, son of a bitch. The judge had handcuffed and brought before him, and demanded to know whether or not he understood what was happening. He was in contempt of court, and he refused to say anything which greatly upset Judge Guest. He then was taken to jail, he was sentenced to jail, and on his way out of the court, I'm afraid he repeated his profanity, at which point the judge jumped off the bench and came down and attacked him, had to be physically removed. So the question in the case was whether the contempt holding held, and of course, Reyes Regnat said non-guvena, it held, nothing in the behavior of the judge demitted from the contempt sentencing. The defendant's argument that his statement had been ad hominem, not directed at the judge, was thrown out. So there we have that duality that I want to then discuss just very briefly in relation to a third point, which is what does this suppressed jurisdiction actually mean? And there is a history of the yourse imaginum. If you look at the early ins and core treaties on images, heraldry, honor, colors, the visible world and realm of the law, then you find that it is entirely about an order of visible precedence that is modeled upon the angelogical hierarchy. The moment that you have a hierarchy, you have politics and you have law. You have no law without hierarchy and it is that hierarchy that gets instantiated. If you look at Richard Hooker, we are not far removed and should not believe that we are any distance from the angels. They are what give us meaning. They are what infuse us with honor and dignity and all those other flowers of living. And so to the ins of core, a houses of honor. If you look at Shasna, catalogus glorii mundi, law book that begins first substantive section with the nine gradations of the angelogical. And it's that which is translated by Seldon who uses some of the same images as does Panzerollos into the order of law and the order of the courts. So then just last example, if I'm permitted, which is a case in which the visibility of law was precisely the issue. And this is such a good question for today. Canadian minister was getting divorced. It was an unimposed divorce case. The hearing was held at lunchtime in the courthouse and the report stipulates that the judge without his roads retired with a reporter to his private library at Garalupo couldn't have done it better, yeah? So the hearing was held through a door marked with a brass plaque and black letters, private. Then there was an inner corridor and a further set of doors and then the judicial chambers library. And that's where the hearing was held. The judge opened it counterintuitively by saying, we're now in open court. But of course they weren't in open court and there was no public present. Although as Lord Blainsborough says, the judge would probably have liked some public present because judging can be lonely. You like to be loved, but he wasn't. So the question was whether the decree Nisi that he promulgated on that occasion could stand. So the aptly named Privy Council gave a very lengthy set of judgments in which they said, holding hearings in public is the sort of the Constitution. What distinguishes the judicial from the administrative is precisely ceremony, right and wrong. It's not the same. Does a judge demit his capacity? Can a judge be a judge? If it's an idle ceremony? No, it is pestily exemptly, which is just gobbledygook for the worst of examples. It is to be frowned upon and not to be permitted and will never be permitted. So long as common law is common law. And then as to the decree Nisi, well nothing turns on that. That can stand. We'll uphold it. Thank you very much. In other words, no relation between the two. Okay, thank you. Do you want it? No, I actually don't need it. Okay, then you could put him at the top. You've got a 20% chance. He's in hell right here. No, I'm ready. I want to thank the organizers again. The organizers such a great group of people. I flew from far away and from Israel I mentioned this just to point to the fact that I have a big jet lag. So if you've seen me yawning during my own presentation you should not think that it's boring. I'd like to begin by trying to tie whatever is going to happen later with the theme of the conference, the law end and law as, and then set it aside and we can come back to it in the discussion. How might one go about gaining new imaginative leverage to enliven the practice of legal history? Ask the call for papers. And calls for a paradigm shift. Presumably a new perspective is needed not simply because law end has run its course but because it was committed from the outset to an unimaginative, realist perception of law. Presumably law as is an attractive alternative not only for its novelty but because it calls on us to imagine. The turn to metaphor is offered as a way to free us from the bonds of empiricism, historicism and other scientism. The disenchantment, the disenchanting spell of the social sciences is to be countered or complimented by a re-enchanted writing of legal history. The following study of Jewish ritual in 19th century Germany may be read in part as an attempt to think through the relationship between science, realism and disenchantment on the one hand and metaphor, imagination and re-enchantment on the other hand. Not only in the writing of legal history but in legal history itself. What seems at first as conflicting views on method and theory may turn out to be a dialectical but later I'll use a different adjective a dialectical movement of law itself. One may find between the lines of the following study a Jewish parable about the law end and law as of modern legal history. So since this is a parable and you may not understand it let me just clarify a few points. So basically my argument will work on one explicit level and one implicit. Explicitly what I want to do is challenge or rethink the Vibrarian thesis of secularization that is to rethink on a first order a history of modernity. On a second level implicit is a question about the writing of legal history and there what I want to ask is about again about secularization and its other that is tends to re-enchant not only legal history but the writing of legal history and I wasn't planning this but in a way Peter's paper belongs to this movement in the writing of legal history which is can be read along with the men's writings and Benjamin's writings and writing the political theology and other writings in legal history as attempt to re-enchant the writing of legal history. So I'll call this movement later ritualization of law. Ritualization in the case study that I'm writing about is ritualization of religion sort of the invention of religion the modern concept of religion as ritual and along side with this we can ask how did to an extent the writing of legal history in the writing of legal history how did law become a ritual that is enchanted in the way that it has and so I'm interested in this double movement. My field that is what I'll be talking about concerns in the paper for different Jewish practices that were known as rituals in the late 18th century and 19th century. The ritual bath, circumcision, animal slaughter and the burial of the dead. In my talk today I'll focus only about ritual slaughter of animals and the problems it raises. Basically the history of these rituals has been written and rewritten. There's a lot of literature about it. I think it more or less can be said to belong to the Vibrarian secularization approach to history and legal history. But it's an attempt to show how the tension between religion and the secular state is the story of these rituals and how attempts have been made to either prohibit or limit or reform these religious practices both from above and from within the religious community itself. And what I'd like to do is add another account of this history which won't tell the story of how these rituals became secularized or how the tension between the state and the religious practices concerned movements of secularization but rather I'm interested in how the rituals became understood to be rituals. How they were ritualized. And what does that exactly mean? And I'll return to that point in a minute. So I choose to look at Jews in Germany because Germany, Vibrar's home country is the place in which secularization is the name of the game, is the strongest and can be most observable. And the Jewish community in Germany adopted in many ways these secularized, rationalized notions of modernity. So it's a place where secularization is used as most prominent but I want to look there to find something else. And it's important for me that the discussion is about the Jews so it doesn't have to be about the Jews. It could easily be about the Muslims today in Germany. But the story is about how when we look at Jewish practice thinking about it through the prism of ritual, as a ritual, thinking about it through the prism of ritualization raises certain questions about adopting a Christian perspective on Jewish practice but not only that. That's a point. And as for the specific examples that I'll be talking about, ritual slaughter of animals, basically the story as I won't tell it here at length, the story from the Vibrarian perspective is on how religious practice, religious ritual raised certain questions for the culturstaffer of modern civilized society. Part of these questions concern the fact that ritual slaughter was considered to be cruel to the animal, unnecessarily cruel. Part of it has to concern the way that it was unhygienic, to stir up the blood, and what have you. And the story is usually told as how the Jewish community partly abandoned dietary laws and ritual slaughter partly tried to reform them, partly tried to justify them in accordance with modern sensitivities that has argued that Jewish slaughter is in fact humane. But as you'll see, my concern is with a different take on this question. I'm interested in how secularization or the secular invented simultaneously itself and its other, that is, religion in this very specific way. I should though make two preliminary comments to sort of preempt possible misunderstandings of the argument. So first, my argument isn't about the dialectics of rationality and irrationality that goes back to the first comment after the previous panel. It's not about that neither in the history nor in the writing of legal history. That's not the position that I'm interested in. Rather, we'll see that in a way secularization and ritualization are not contrary but rather complementary and in any event need to be understood first of all, each on its own terms rather than merely as contrast. The second point is that my argument, it doesn't belong so much to the post-colonial discourse of how the other is invented in a relationship or dynamics of power as a contrast to the hegemonic view. I'm interested in, rather I'm interested in the transformation of religion itself independent of the fact that we're talking here about a minority or another. I'm interested in how religion transforms and in that way I could be talking not only about Jews and Muslims but perhaps also about Christians and that's a different topic that I won't get into today. So, during the 18th century and 19th century Jewish customs were referred to indistinguishably as ritual, that is ritus, kard, cultus, and sermoni. Though the terms were not new in themselves and had been used both in popular culture and by German law to refer to religious practice in general and Jewish law in particular, they were now increasingly being used in a new sense. What precisely were these new semantics of ritual and how did they affect the way religious law was understood, practiced, and regulated? In speaking of ritualization, I rely on part of Talal Assad's work on the transformation of the concept of ritual which took place during the 18th and 19th century. Assad documents the rise of a modern anthropological sense of ritual which views religious practice as symbolic interaction and suffuses traditional customs with webs of meaning and signification. The modern notion of ritual replaced, according to Assad and I rely on him here, a more traditional notion of ritual as manual, a set of practices the importance of which lay not in their meaning but rather in a precise adherence to the renewed and well-prescribed rules of conduct. The transformation in the discourse and practice of Jewish law consisted of two interrelated movements which are characteristic of the modern notion of ritual. First, defamiliarization, a notion defined by the British cultural anthropologist, Nadel, he says, when we speak of ritual, we have in mind, first of all, actions exhibiting a striking or incongruity rigidity that is some conspicuous regularity not accounted for by professional aims of the actions. Defamiliarization involved the signaling out of certain Jewish practices as peculiar and thus worthy of special attention. During the period, a variety of discourses and practices of defamiliarization developed which allowed non-Jews and Jews alike to single out certain Jewish customs as particularly superstitious, exotic, or supernatural. The second element of the process of ritualization was symbolization, symbolization, namely, embedding the ritual with symbolic meaning beyond its practical sense. Now, Radcliffe Brown says with, sorry, ritual acts differ from technical acts in having, in all instances, some expressive or symbolic element in them. The symbolic aspect of the ritual often refers to a supernatural domain but may also have more worldly reference. The two elements that is defamiliarization and symbolization are in fact interrelated or can be seen as one. Turning mundane practices into unfamiliar spectacles transformed Jewish tradition into a riddle, the hidden significance of which should be deciphered and conversely infusing custom with supernatural, exotic, or otherwise enchanted signification turned ordinary traditions into obscure rituals. Ritualization, thus defined, should be understood as a contrapuntal motion to securization, whereas securization is an attempt to disenchant religious practice, ritualization is an attempt to re-enchant the practice and infuse it with mystery and concealed signification. The two movements are more complementary than contradictory. Securization criticizes religious practice for its lack of reason, whereas ritualization aims to closely study and decipher the meaning of the mystery. Securization is based on the premise that nothing is without reason, whereas ritualization stems from the equally modern notion that nothing is without meaning. When they wonder whether a Jewish law was not always a ritual in the last sense and whether the labeling of Jewish practices ritual was a more or less accurate depiction of the practice at least as it appeared to external observers, would it not be correct to describe shikhita animal slaughter as conspicuous regularity not accounted for by professional aims? Is it not the case that Mila, Jewish circumcision, was always understood to bear some symbolic meaning and signification? So I don't have time now to enter this question. I guess there are historical moments preceding the ones I'll be talking about, that suggest that this already exists, but I want to argue that by the same token that we can speak of in modernity about rationalization and still acknowledge the fact that there are earlier moments of this movement. Similarly, we can speak about ritualization even if we can acknowledge some symbolic understanding of religious law prior to the moments I'll be describing, the modern moments I'll be talking about. So now, what the paper does at length and I'll have to discuss very briefly are different moments of ritualization that I think should be understood together. They happen sometimes simultaneously outside of the Jewish community and within the Jewish community, they happen in religious contexts, whether Christian or Jewish, and they also happen within, take place within what we would call a more secular, but in the context of what I wanted to talk about, we'll say modern context. So the first moment concerns, how am I doing from the start? Nine more minutes. Okay, so the first moment I want to talk about concerns that the Hebrewists, a group of scholars who study Jewish Jews and Jewish custom and religion, the most famous names associated with this group and already in the 15th and 16th century are Pico de la Miranda and John Wichlin, but this group writes throughout up to the 18th century about Jewish religion in a post-reformation context. So this is an early moment of what I'm talking about as ritualization of Jewish practice. In this literature, Jews were no longer charged for the mistaken adherence to the old covenant as in Catholicism, but rather for the fabrication of the new covenant, the Talmud, which was far removed from the word of God. The Baha'i literature in this sense differs both from the late medieval disputes between Jews and Christians and from the later 19th anthropological and other writings about by German Christians directed in the context that took place in the context of Jewish emancipation. Precisely for this reason, one may see this literature as distinct phenomena and one which, as we shall see, prepared the ground for the transformation of Jewish practice from custom to ritual. So discussing animal slaughter, for example, in this literature, we see that a lot of interest in this more than, for instance, in the prohibition of the pork because its details do not appear in the Bible and it's less associated with biblical Jewish law, hence the movement to defamiliarization of the practice. And a lot of these treatises are titled the peculiarities of the Jews or Jews unveiled and have this notion of sort of mystifying Jewish practice. And then some of the authors note that the laws of Shaitan are meant to humiliate Christians by offering them the rear parts of the slaughtered cattle which Jews were prohibited to consume. The point is that the slaughtered body of the animal was received as a mirror of social relationships and symbolic interaction. And more can be said about this literature. I talk about later writers in this tradition in the 18th century, but now I want to focus on a different moment in this story, the moment of, the Oriental moment in which Jews are perceived as coming from the desert to the Orient. The association of Jewish tradition was the Orient during the turn of the 19th century marked a clear transformation of the critique of Judaism from theology to anthropology and initiated a new stage of the ritualization process. The claim that Jews were a nomadic people, a nomadic tribe whose tradition reflect their original habitat became popularized through the writing of German Orientalists such as David Michailis already in the 18th century. The association of the Jewish ritual with Islam and the life of the desert tribe opened the possibility for a simultaneous process of secularization and ritualization of traditional practices. On the one hand, Jewish laws and specifically the dietary code were explained as a primitive yet proto-rational response to the conditions of the Orient. On the other hand, the very association of the Jews with the exotic desert tribes recontextualized the Jews outside of Europe and infused Jewish practice with cultural significance. Alongside with attempts to give Jewish ritual or rational significance through the science of medicine and nutrition, one may find a parallel attempt to infuse Jewish practice with ritualistic significance. History, archeology, and the new science of the Orient were brought to bear on the origins of the Jewish tradition. In 1869, the renowned author John Dumechen, who had returned from the expedition in the Nile Valley, published his book, Historic and Schriften, Historical Inscriptions of Ancient Egyptian Monuments in Leipzig. Among the inscriptions was a relief from an Egyptian temple which showed the sacrifices for the goddess Mithatris, who was buried in this temple. The relief offered a visual depiction of the ancient practice of ritual slaughter, including the knife cut, the pouring of the blood to the ground and the sacrifice of the animal to the gods. The archaeological artifact vindicated the opinion held by both Orientalists and lay observers that the Jewish ritual of animal slaughter had its origins not in the biblical word of God, but rather in the pagan tradition of old Egypt. The Jews who fled from Egypt around 1500 BC incorporated the practice into the religion and carried it with them into the new land. So this is about external observers and then I have a few sections about transformations within Jewish tradition itself. I'll mention one of them which has to do with the rise of Hasidic Judaism in Eastern Europe but also finds its way into Germany. Basically it has to do with the belief and tend to reinterpret the ritual practice of slaughter by saying that it has to do with incarnation and reincarnation. The idea is that the animal has within it a human soul and that the only way to release this human soul and allow it to resume a human form is to slaughter it properly and consume the meat. This is something that although exists in certain mystical notions of Judaism already in the 13th century becomes public and part of a lively movement of Judaism in Eastern Europe and then to an extent in Germany and I think points to an aspect of the re-enchantment of religious practice. Another movement which I won't have time to talk about concerns more sort of so-called rational elements of Jewish reform and orthodoxy and here again we find processes of secularization but along them process of ritualization attempts to understand Jewish practice as ritual and hence abolish it or attempts to understand Jewish ritual as legitimate in the word of God but then to reinterpret it as symbolic and in this context I point among other things to the works of Mendelssohn and Hielsch. So I guess it's time to wrap things up. In the paper I suggest that this is not just a history of the perception of religion the practice of religion but this has implications for state law as it applies to the Jews. By naming and viewing Jewish practice as ritual one could either suggest that it has no defense under the religious practice because it's not religious, it's mir, ritus, it's mir, ritual or one could argue in fact that it is an authentic part of Jewish ritual but then offer and justify it through its symbolic significance. I guess in some ways my paper should be read as a meditation on the notions that Heidegger discusses in the fate of religion in the modern age so I'll just conclude with this quote from Heidegger and I hope that it will shed a little bit more light than what I was trying to accomplish in the paper. So the loss of the gods is a twofold process. On the one hand the world picture is Christianized in as much as the cause of the world is posited as infinite, unconditional, absolute. So this is religion as supernatural, natural. On the other hand, Christian transformed Christian doctrine into a worldview, the Christian worldview and in that way makes itself modern and up to date. But the loss of the gods is so far from excluding religiosity that rather only through the loss is the relation of the gods change into mere religious experience. When this occurs, then the gods have fled. The resultant void is compensated for by means of historiographical and psychological investigation of men. I'm not sure that I know how to do it. Okay, so I talked about the re-enchantment of legal history and also the enchantment of the world and modernity. I, my paper is not about re-enchantment of legal history but I do have a story about a magician. So I also like to start by thanking Chris and Kathleen for organizing this conference. Although I must admit that in several last several months actually it was several times that I had invented the paper because I was trying to think about how my bottom up, down to earth, research projects are related to methodology and theory. And ultimately I decided that I was just sharing frustrations with you. Talk about two recent research projects online dealing with the history of tax law and culture and talk about the problems that I encountered trying to use the conventional law and society or law and culture framework in telling the stories that I wanted to tell and using the sources in ways that would be relevant to telling a conventional relational story about the relationship between law and culture. So basically the paper which is quite long summarizes these two research projects which are, it doesn't say so anywhere in the paper the projects are explicitly about one question which actually took for most treatment from an article that the Laws of England published in the 1990s and the question is, is law like a refrigerator which seems like a frivolous question but it's actually a serious one. It's about law as technology. So that's my contribution to the law as a metaphor that animates this conference. There's a question about the universality of law or law as something particular. Is law like a refrigerator in the sense that it can't really distinguish between an origin or a Nigerian refrigerator? The refrigerator is the same way whether there are no way or in Nigeria or is law something that's embedded in the culture of society? It's not a technology. And obviously one of the ways to resolve this problem is to distinguish between different areas of law. I know people have said law is like technology in certain areas of law and not in others. For example, we think of family law or criminal law as embedded in culture and society but once we pretend to think about it such as corporate law or tax law which is the I'm interested in as being a universal, being like technology in the sense that they function the same way in every society and every culture. Certainly because tax law is usually studied by people who are influenced by economic literature with its universalizing tendency. Most of the literature on tax law assumes tax law whether tax law is embedded or whether law generally is embedded in cultural society or not. Tax law functions the same way in different societies and culture because people react that to the same economic incentives whether they're Nigerian or the region. And I teach tax law but I'm in a lot of society and I'm a scholar and a legal historian and I was always interested in finding a place where I can show that tax law is also culturally embedded and I begin the paper with actually a story that is not analyzed in detail because it's not a legal history story but I think it's kind of relevant in the sense that it encapsulates the problems that I also encountered in my two historical case studies that I study, a story about a contemporary case which actually my wife was involved in and I think it's a really nice case that's my story about the petition. So I will kind of talk about it in some detail. So that's the case in Israeli, it's very important to adjust this case from 2004, the Israeli Legislation Center versus the Minister of Finance, my wife works for the Israeli Legislation Center which is an NGO involved mostly in state and religion questions in Israel. And the story of this case is a story of somebody called Erzal Rhozzella, somebody who comes from a family of all conjures who, according to some, comes from many centuries served as intermediaries between God and believers, basically giving advice and also blessing ordinary believers in a way that's quite similar to what happened in other Jewish communities. For example, East European communities and Hasidic rabbis in these communities, as for example, Rhozzella is an equivalent, an East European equivalent of Erzal Rhozzella family and the family moved to Israel and they continued doing what they were doing in Morocco or maybe not, the anthropological literature says that there's a question whether the tradition was continued or whether this is some sort of new age version of traditional religious practices. But in any event, this guy is our Rhozzella who was extremely successful as a saint and miracle worker because a lot of very wealthy people came to him asking for blessings and advice and allegedly he made about 150 million U.S. dollars just by giving advice and blessing to his followers. There was a time of merchants and religious developers and all sorts of other people and maybe he knows something that we don't know, we poorly do historians, maybe there is something in these blessings. Okay, so anyway, here's the guy, I took this picture from Google, I downloaded it from some newspaper, I'm not sure that this is his real picture because he's a very secretive person so I'll make it somebody else. So I'm interested in this because of tax law and how is this related to tax law? Well, if he made 150 million U.S. dollars, that's a lot of money and at some point in the 1990s these other tax authorities wanted to tax him saying that basically this is the money that he got was income which should be taxed, the marginal tax rate in his time, the marginal tax rate was 50% so he was supposed to pay about 75 million U.S. dollars as income tax and he said, no, it's wrong, this is not income, these are gifts and in his money tax law and also an English tax law which is related to tax law in Facebook, gifts are not taxed, okay? The exact tax law of these said, this is very similar to what you got money giving advice just like psychologists or business consultants give advice, of course the advice is based on irrational factors, you think about business consultants for example, getting an MBA from public business school doesn't mean that the advice is not irrational. Okay, so they, there was a debate, and I think it was a tax settlement, they said no and that was asked to pay five million dollars instead of 75 million and some, a large part of the money was actually was to be donated to charities of his own choosing rather than given to the state and after all, the NGO that my wife was all decided to position these things pretty cold and they lost so they lost for various reasons which I don't have time to go into but I'm not interested in the case because of its general administrative law taxes that's I'm interested in one single argument made by Albert Zelos lawyer in the brief submitted in response to the petition and that's, I'm interested in it because it's basically a tax law, cultural defense, something that I've never counted before kind of spelled me to think deeply about the relationship of tax law and culture. Albert Zelos lawyer basically said that he shouldn't be taxed because he gives his blessings to his followers without asking for anything in the term. Some of his followers I just said I'll talk the long generosity and give you a gift to Albert Zelos and the gift is based on a spiritual and religious belief which is voted in a church tradition that is more than 1,000 years old and what implicitly I think he was saying if I interpret the argument correctly was that basically we have here a cultural system of categories which are non-western and non-secular so additional the distinction between the market and the private sphere between business income and gifts is not universal, different communities, different cultures have different distinctions and basically the western modern secular cult is imposing their own distinctions on a community which doesn't share them and basically they're oppressing this community or especially oppressing Mahmoud Al-Zehra and we don't know whether the argument was a major argument convincing the justices to dismiss the case or not because there were a variety of arguments but I was saying hey this is really it needs I never encounter such an argument and let's think about what the implications are for the nature of tax and the fact that suddenly we see cultural defenses raised in tax documents and I thought that the 2004 I thought that I lied about this case because I found a lot of interesting materials in the documents submitted to Supreme Court and other documents related to the case but it turned out that there was not enough material because a lot of tax issues are basically secret and there are laws in Israel and also in the United States and other jurisdictions which basically say that you cannot individual settlement procedures with individual tax payers are not public information and so unfortunately I had to pursue the matter by looking using historical examples rather than contemporary ones where the materials are more accessible in the archive I also liked going to the archive as even with all the spirits and told us about the fetish of the archive and the desire for the archive and I totally meant that on the other hand I'm a big historian because of the archive and so I'll tell you I now move to talking about the two historical case studies where I actually ask the same question is tax law universal, is it cultural specific by looking at historical case studies but before that I want to say something about the question that the apocetral case raises which I think is also relevant was also my problem in encountering these sort of materials and also a problem that ultimately this conference is about so we can ask a lot of interesting I think normative and descriptive questions about the apocetral story and about the single argument made in the brief by apocetral's lawyer the question that I think is relevant to this conference is a question about the use of sources a basic question for historians including the new historians everywhere, everywhere and the question is how reliable is the argument to what extent can we use the argument to learn something about laws outside when apocetral's lawyer was talking about tradition it's a tradition of the culture it didn't make use of the term culture but he was actually talking about the culture of the specific group, the rabbi and the small wealth to what extent was the lawyer a sincere informant was the lawyer an inventor of cultural traditions so there was a lot of literature of the national tradition usually we talk about the nation state and the national tradition but obviously you can look at it in many other contexts and one might say that apocetral's lawyer was basically a fictitiously describing creating a fiction about some sort of beliefs and cultural categories and practices of a given social group in order basically to serve the base material interests of his client, the taxpayer and of course these are just two alternatives to interpret the argument in addition to possible alternative not the only one is to say that cultural info is involved in the argument in various ways for example there's a set of cultural notions usually associated with the elites for example, Orientalism or these images about non-Western other that the lawyer and the audience the justices share and the lawyer takes and uses to actually undermine the logic of the Orientalist discourse because usually we think about Orientalist discourse describing the other of non-Western others different as he used to support or legitimize the power of Western secular modern state but in this case it was kind of turned on itself or twisted because the lawyer was using the Orientalist discourse or the Orientalist images to the extent that they were found in the arguments actually to get his non-Western non-seccular non-Western client not to make the access to the longest time through in the case So these three possible modes of interpretation are not given once. One can ask which one of them is correct. And maybe in a specific contemporary setting, it's easy to give an answer, because we might think that we can go and kind of interview the lab IOS followers and ask them, do we have different conceptions about the distinction between income and gift? And obviously, that's a problem, because it's these are legal terms that I would give a specific answer, but maybe observing his followers would allow us to answer this question. Obviously, when you use historical sources, that's far more difficult. But still, I think thinking about these questions is interesting in the sense that they, I think, encapsulate one of the major problems of the literature on law and society, more specifically law and culture that has been written in the last 100 years and that I think is alluded to in his comments in the morning. So as we all know, law and society literature and also legal history for the last 100 years has been alternating between the views of the relationship of law and its outside, law and society, law and culture. So for a long time, the view was that law is basically a mill, law reflects its outside, the economy, society, law and culture, law is passive, law is a superstructure rather than a base, I would say. And since the 1980s, I think, how the literature has moved to viewing the law as the most important or active ingredient in the relationship, law in the workshop where cultural notions have been constituted. So husband and wife and brother and wife and other notions are, I'll say, some people first created or constructed in legal discourse and then somehow taken down to general culture or to society. And obviously, since all these versions of the relationship of law and society or what kind of cultural are patently inaccurate, a lot of people have been talking about law and culture or society that has been mutually constitutive, as I think a confession of the way of talking about the relationship. And there was this interesting article that came out a year ago about the mutually constitutive approach and the fact that it's basically a dead end in the sense that it assumes the boundary between law and its outside and therefore basically prevents us from telling a coherent causal story about law and changes in law. So Hirschtag is interesting, I think, theoretical discussion of why once we've accepted the mutually constitutive approach, we basically are abandoning any hope of telling a causal story. Although he also says that when legally storied are faced with this problem or this dilemma, and they often kind of live their way out, they basically say that it's not a real problem because for legally storied, grand theoretical arguments about the relationship of law and society are not important. They are existed in the specific, in the local, and in the particular law. So at the end of the article that basically legally storied find refuge in specific stories, specific case studies. And the argument is that in this specific case studies, the vector of influence, law, constructing culture or culture of being milled in the legal donkeys, the legal institutions, the legal arguments, and it's easy to determine. We go down in level of assumption. Once we go down enough, we just basically find an easy story, a simple causal story that we can tell. So I think that my paper does is that actually just give two examples of how, even if we go down in level of abstraction, even if we focus on the particular, the local, it's very difficult to determine the vector of influence. So the two case studies that I discussed in the paper basically show how I encountered the problem in the actual sources of determining the cause of the relationship between law and culture. So that's the negative part of the paper, although the positive part of the paper, the positive part of the paper is an argument that even if we abandon the desire to tell a coherent causal story about the relationship between law and culture, it's still interesting to ask questions about the cultural history of law generally and of texts specifically. Because there are some more shadowy or less ambitious goals that can be, okay, so I have to really go with it for the case studies. So the basic argument before I go to the case studies is that there's a jurisprudential story that can be told about the nature of law, even if we don't want to tell a causal story about the relationship between law and culture, to the jurisprudential story about the use of cultural arguments in legal debates, especially debates about incantation that's still interesting and relevant, it might teach us something about the nature of law that would be interesting. Okay, so the two, moving on to the two examples, I basically summarized in the paper a story about the history of the transplantation of colonial income tax law, how the British basically imposed income tax law in Venezuela and Palestine. I was looking for cultural arguments in debates about the imposition of income tax in Venezuela and Palestine, and they found, and I thought that my sources would tell me whether income tax law is culturally specific or not, and obviously I didn't get a single answer. What I found is that while there were a lot of cultural arguments used in the debates about incantation in Palestine, arguments about cultural sense that people were referring to of tax law and bookkeeping practices, literacy, usable consumption, attitude survival and standards of living, not everybody was making the argument, so what was interesting in looking at the sources was that lawyers and judges in Palestine were not using cultural arguments, they seemed to have assumed that tax law is not culturally specific, but that politicians and administrators were using these arguments, and while I discussed it in the paper, I couldn't really come up with a coherent story about law constructing some sort of cultural image of a local society in its tax practices, or a local society being reflected in the legal debates, it was interesting to see that lawyers in Palestine at least tended to treat cultural difference in a way that was very different than other actors. Okay, so that's the first case study, and the second case study is a story that I'm working on right now and I haven't finished, I'm working on is a historical tax privacy and tax privacy in Britain in the early 19th century, and I was thinking again of seeing some sort of cultural notion of privacy being reflected in the tax debates or being constructed, and then it was very difficult to mirror it in the sources to again determine the vector of influence, but it was very interesting to see the very same rhetorical moves that I saw in 20th century Palestine seem to have been replicated before, or seemed to have emerged before in the UK, but using different terms, the term or tradition was cultural and constitution, and also that kind of lawyers were not really involved in the whole question of tax law, there was no tax law in the modern sense in the UK in the 19th century, the first tax cases, in the tax cases are actually from the late 19th century, and the others are totally out of the picture, it's already, it's an administrative and political debate about tax law, and also tax law actually was an interesting movement of taxation from something that's totally, or not totally, but relatively not related to law, to something that lawyers are really involved in. Okay, so we don't have enough time to go over everything, we're going to have to finish, but just in conclusion, my people's basically a negative part of my paper is just showing, giving two examples, showing that even concrete case studies are difficult to save on arguments about the cultural tax debate, the fact that some sort of outside cultural notions which was shared by a given social group, or the cultural aspects of it was constructed in these debates, whether to further some specific political economic goals of given individuals, or in any other way, but it's still really interesting to ask how cultural appeals in legal discourse when does cultural terms appear in legal debates, cultural term, or in general legal debates, or tax debates, what other terms are used, and especially if it was using them, okay, and because the question was using them is, I think, an interesting Jewish potential cultural, actually an interesting Jewish potential question, it was once one realizes that lawyers were not using cultural arguments in 20th century Palestine, but for some reason they are now starting to use them, for example, in the case of 21st century that I mentioned, and one can ask, what does that teach us about the nature of legal discourse, is it because legal discourse tends to emphasize similarity in low-cultural difference, more than other political or administrative discourse at different points in time, maybe because it puts the time going more formalized, and what does it mean for law to become more a tool to catch a difference now in 21st century, what does it say about the nature of law is a discourse about the nature of society now, compared to say the 20th century or the 90th century. So, Aditya, thank you very much. My paper is going to pick up, in a sense, along this line, maybe the Heidegger at the end of shy's paper, if the gods flee when we rationalize ritual, we can also say that justice flees when we rationalize law, and this brings up the problem of the history of law, or in other words, what's the point of trying to understand or rationalize history, if that's going to, in a sense, chase justice away, and so the paper is in a certain way a polemic about the history of law, but it's about maybe the need to give up on at least a certain kind of history and replace truth with lying. So the paper's called History in the Noble Court of Lying. On 1886, Friedrich Nietzsche reissued his first youthful brash, and as he put it, fragurige, our questionable book, The Birth of Tragedy. The Birth of Tragedy, he informed us in the newly written Critical Preface, which was in many ways a book infected with the passions of youth. Nevertheless, Nietzsche deemed it worthy of republication because it posed a valuable question, one of the first rank, as he put it, not only an abstract word, the question was a deep personal question. The book asked, what's the purpose of Greek art? What, if any, is the value of art? Nearly 125 years later, we here are asked to think about the value of an esoteric, sub-discipline of academic study, the value of legal history. What is the value of legal history? Well, to ask is to accuse. Even if the conference announcement denies a crisis and claims that legal history is a thriving discipline, we ask, what is the value of legal history? Why is a rose a rose? Because it is. With Nietzsche reverberating in the background, the question imposes itself. Is this a question of the value of legal history, merely one of academic worth or abstract worth? Is it a personal query? Is it an opportunity for self-justification? Or does it scratch beneath the surface of a scabbers wound? The rationales for legal history, I think, split into two. We saw them in the first panel with the question of the truth. Is it useful? On the one hand, legal history is useful. It makes us better lawyers, it gives us examples. It even deepens our understanding of ourselves in sort of a law and society or a law and culture tradition. On the other hand, many of the people here, I think, see the uselessness of legal history as proof of its humanity and beauty. Legal history, let us be honest, most of us say has no use. We practice law and or legal history because it's fun. And finally, legal history is an art. And the historian and artist, we produce beautiful stories that have no use, right? The art for the art to learn, art for art's sake. Now, these two apologies for legal history take different tax. The former subordinates law and society or legal history scholars to lawyers in a way that many of us find troublesome. The latter promises the scholar admittance into the fraternity of creative souls. The choice between the strategic laborer and the bemused artiste is, of course, no choice at all. For scholars weaned upon the rarified milk of sacrifice in the name of truth and fidelity to higher calling, the horror of wage labor isn't matched only by the charm of spontaneous creativity. Nevertheless, we ought not too quickly to embrace the absolute autonomy of scholarship on the model of artistic narcissism. As Richard Nietzsche warns, art for the sake of art. That is an equally dangerous principle. It runs up to a slandering of reality. If one detaches an ideal from the actual, one debases the actual. The beautiful for the sake of the beautiful, the true for the sake of the true, the good for the good, all Nietzsche says are evil with regard to the actual world. Scholarship for the sake of scholarship, he says, is a dangerous principle. The danger lies in its seductive powers. For the passion for truth must, like the love of beauty draws ever upward and away from this world. The siren call of the ideal carries with it an unavoidable distaste for the actual. History for the sake of history, history as an art, is the mantra of someone who disdains the present. Now, Nietzsche's answer is, history not for history's sake, art not for art's sake, but history and art for life. That is Nietzsche's polemic response to the false choice between the usefulness and the uselessness of the historical endeavor. But how does history serve life without being reduced to some sort of utilitarian end, means to an end? The same question applies to the wider and I think more common and trendier field of law and. The initial rebelliousness felt by those reminded the lawyers that law happens in life too and not only in books faded quickly. It turned out that the social scientific study of legal reality was just as partial an account of law as the conceptual law that it replaced. And now a new generation of law and scholars has abandoned both the ideal and the real worlds for the more imaginary realms of law as. These scholars, I should say we, are part of an effort as the conference circular hopes to quote, go about gaining new imaginative leverage to enliven the practice of legal history. If our task is to succeed, however, it might help to ask why must legal history be brought back to life? What to ask again is the value of legal history. Allow me to rephrase the question and brought it to scope. The plague of purposelessness is not exclusive to legal history. Not only legal history, but all scientific research is in question in this conference. For what is the worth of the scientific pursuit of truth when one has ceased to believe in truth? The crisis in legal history therefore merely reflects the crisis of identity stalking the life of science. What is being asked, what deserves to be asked again and again is the why of scientific or academic research at all. What for the science of legal history or what is the value of academic study of law? To gain insight into our question, we turn to Nietzsche and consider the two questions in unison. What for the sciences of law and legal history? What for Greek art? What these apparently dissimilar questions share is a common enemy. Both questions reflect a worry, even a fear about the power of science. Nietzsche's question works in two directions. First, to ask, what is the significance of the tragic myth among the Greeks? Second, and more importantly, Nietzsche, in his words, got hold of something frightful and dangerous, a problem with horns, but not necessarily a bull. In any case, a new problem. Today, I should say that it was the problem of science. This is all from the birth of tragedy. The problem of science is the problem of truth. Truth as science. Truth as the search for reasons behind the visible world of things and events. Science as the belief in a reason and the rational order of the universe, nier est sine eratzione, as Leibniz would have it, the principle of science, everything it is has a reason. And this is the presupposition of all scientific activity, including the study of ritual. There is not strictly judged a science without any presuppositions, says Nietzsche. Why does the world have a reason? Because truth itself is a metaphysical faith. That is, it's a belief in a metaphysical worth, a worth in truth itself. Truth is the latest and the last in a series of metaphysical beliefs. Faith and truth as the world beyond sets the problem of truth and the problem of science within Nietzsche's thinking on aesthetic ideals. To believe in a world of truth is to disbelieve the world of common sense. The sunrise is replaced with the earth's orbit around the sun. Love and depression both yield to reactions from chemical imbalances in the brain. The true world pulls us from the real and the unconditional will to truth is nothing but the unyielding quote belief on the aesthetic ideal itself. As Nietzsche writes elsewhere, the one committed to truth in that bold and ultimate sense, as the one presupposes belief in science, says yes, therefore, to another world. Not the world of life. The problem of science is the final manifestation of the aesthetic ideal and with the metaphysical rejection of this world. However, the problem of science, as Nietzsche tells us, is also the problem of history. History is a remembering, a holding onto what is no longer. History is a scientific look past the present moment of life into the misty regions of what was. Why, however, does one look back? Why does one remember? Wouldn't it be easier and happier to live simply in the present? We all know of Nietzsche's happy cow, the one who chews his grass, doesn't know from yesterday, and the happy cow lives without memory and history and only thus does he did not know that he has fallen short of his dreams and goals. The cow lives like a child with no past disowned. Happiness is always a product of forgetting or the power of not remembering. Only forgetting what I have promised and learned in the past allows me the freedom to pursue my dreams in the present. At a minimum, happiness requires, I forget the basic rule of memory that my present happiness will come to an end. Against the happiness of forgetting stands the violence of history. There is a level of sleeplessness or chewing of things over of historical sense in which the living is injured and at the end goes under. History kills insofar as it sets man and life under the burden of the past. It limits his freedom and reminds him of his bondage. History thus stands against life. And yet, the memory of history can as well be made to serve life, that is Nietzsche's mantra. To remember is to exercise not simply a neutral power but rather to activate what Nietzsche calls a plastic force that works to turn the past to man's advantage. Insofar as he has the strength, historical man appropriates the past to his presence. Only by shaping history into his history does man create the world and the culture in which he lives. Man writes, honorants can only exist in a humanly created world in an artificial world. Whereas Nietzsche puts the same thought, only when man, thinking, thinking over, comparing, dividing, uniting limits that unhistorical element through which first inside that encompassing misty cloud, a bright shining light beam of rises. Thus through the power of using the past for life and again making history out of what happened, does our first person first become a person? We only are once we create our history. Man only is in a world, to put the point differently. Only as part of a whole, a polity and immunity does man come to be man. And only in history does man gain a world. A world is a work of art, so might history be as well. Well, at least as history is practiced by historians usually, history is a science. And I ask us to at least keep us ourselves in mind here. We as historians, or to the extent we are, still seek to tell the truth or something. Through the demand, and thus we issue the demand that history become a science. In the relentless effort to spell illusion and rend the veil of surprise and astonishment, the scientific approach to history proclaims fiat veritas heriat vita, right? Live, long live the truth, and long die, well, and then life will die. History seeks truth as objectivity, it turns life into a lifeless object. Against this modern most of history, Nietzsche has another view. It's that, quote, objectivity and justice have nothing to do with one another. To seek truth above and beyond objectivity, to strive for the doing of justice beyond the neutral and a various compromises of fairness, Nietzsche demands that the historian pursue truth and justice beyond objectivity. But what is a historian divorced from the facts of history? I'm sorry, Ariel, how much time do I have at this point? 11 minutes. So I'd like now to just give two examples of what might be a Nietzschean history. One from Nietzsche, and one from some current work that I'm doing. The Nietzschean example is Nietzsche's writing on the law book of Manu, the Gazet's book of Manus, as he talks about it in many of his writings. And as some of you may know, if you know this work, Nietzsche praises the laws of Manu and the law book of Manu and compares it favorably to what he calls the Christian law. Why does he praise the law book of Manu? Well, what he says is that all law must be spoken in the imperative, it must make a claim on us as we heard this morning. And for it to have an imperative claim, it must be seen as true. But for something like any law to be seen as true, Nietzsche says that it depends on being lied well because all truth for Nietzsche is simply a lie that has gotten itself taken as true. So that for law to be successful, it has to be a holy lie, a lie that succeeds in making itself believed as true or holy. Okay, so far so good. But why then do we prefer the Manu code over the Christian code? Because the Christian code also was a holy lie that succeeded in getting itself taken seriously. Well, Nietzsche says that everything depends upon the ends for which we lie, right? Not all lies are the same. The Christian lie for the beyond, based in Rosentemont, a lie against life, therefore about equalizing everyone, taking away what our feelings of difference, our individuality, tames man, brings all men down to slaves. And in its elevation of equality and justice as equality, it denaturalizes the passions of man. The Manu code on the other hand, since most of us don't know it, at least as Nietzsche read it and his historiography here is very weak, I described it much longer in another paper, if you're interested in it. The essence of it is that it naturalizes rank. It naturalizes the caste system. This is what Nietzsche loves about the Manu code. It makes the people who are the high class, the Brahmins, feel good about being Brahmins. And it makes the people who are the lowest, the Shandilah, feel good about being the Shandilah. It makes everybody happy with their class. And it thus naturalizes and justifies difference in the world. And this furniture is essential because what makes us humans interesting is that we're different. The way the pathos of difference, the feeling of distinction is a phrase that Nietzsche comes back to throughout all of his writings. The pathos of difference is that life is will to power. That is, life is the will to form. It is art. It is a natural drive for man to assert himself in their difference and superiority over others. And yet this is uncomfortable. We get scared with difference. We all know this too well. We worry about, oh my God, is my difference justified? Well, what the holy lie the Manu code does is it justifies the difference. And that's the greatness of it for Nietzsche. By the way, Hannah Arendt has been incredibly, it has a similar view on this, right? In which she says that the problem with modern judgment today is that judgment is impossible today. And the reason is, because to judge well, you need to feel yourself superior to someone. And the problem with modernity is that since we all believe everyone has an equal right to judge, true judgment for Arendt is impossible in the modern society. So Nietzsche offers here an example of history through reading of the Manu code. I have, and what he says is that we need to prefer a code that naturalizes difference rather than one that naturalizes equality. A similar project that I'm working on right now is trying to look at the difference between law and revenge. And trying to say that law justifies itself as the anti-revenge. Revenge claims that, to take revenge, claims that I have a right to judge. I have a right to impose my justice on you. And law says no. Everybody is to be treated equally according to procedures. That's what justice is. Law, therefore, equalizes. All crimes must be punished. Punishment equals the wrongness of the crime. We actually take the harm out. We take the passion out. And we punish merely the will, the wrong. In this sense, law, as Nozick says and his critique of revenge requires that we rationalize punishment, justified punishment. What is it against? Extraordinary justice, singular justice, the claim of personal justice. And so the work I'm doing now is trying to read revenge to restore to us another idea of justice, a non-mingled idea of justice in the idea of revenge. The Karamani Christos justice, right? That, which is, as he says, a part, not a science. What I'm trying to suggest in these two examples is that there's another approach to the humanities-oriented legal history. One that, in the service of life, allows the historic artist to aim for an artistic justice. One that strives after truth as something great. The historic artist must not simply give back the facts in events of life, but rather must elevate and glorify life. Only then can the historian seduce others to a vision of a noble and justified life. The value of history is to transfigure the everyday into the beautiful, the transcendent and the just. The value of history is a known, perhaps habitual, theme in everyday melody to be described in a spiritual way, to be elevated, to be raised to an all-encompassing symbol, so that from original themes lets themselves be glimpsed in an entire world of profundity, power, and beauty. The value of history is to ennoble the world through the art of telling. The value of history is to lie in the furtherance of life. What is the value of Greek art? Greek art, each tells us, is the antithesis to the science of history. If science kills living things through its bursting of illusions upon which life depends, the historical art leaves the isolated and lonely facts of existence into its totality. The history of our world must be made beautiful, luminous, and seductive. In other words, the historian must lie the activity inspired by love. To live one must love, for only in the shadow of love can men act. Only surrounded by the shadow of the illusion of love does man create, mainly in the unconditioned belief in perfection and justice. Only a history that glimmers and shines will succeed at serving life. Only the beautiful can draw us down from the ideal to the embrace of the real. To make the chaos and pain of the real world lovable, to make our suffering lovable, demands the act of life one who loves that which cannot be loved. The science of history must become the art of history in order to seduce historical man to life. Art, as Nietzsche writes, is the great enabler of life, the great seductress of life, the great stimulant of life. The absence of art would render life unbearable. Hence, for the sake of life, we need art. What in life is unbearable that necessitates the redemptive power of art? The youth of Nietzsche and the birth of tragedy discovered the source of art, and all appearing or shining, to lie in the unbearable, Dionysian insight into the necessary suffering and contradiction of the truth of being. The selenium wisdom that the best thing for man is to not be born, and the second best to die quickly. From his earliest writings, Nietzsche was compelled to the metaphysical assumption that the true being in Ur-Aina as the eternally suffering and full of contradiction needs the beautiful vision of the lustful appearance for its constant redemption. Faced with the unbearable pessimism of the world, we have need of lies and of art to live. The core thought of Nietzsche's metaphysics is the unbearable contradiction, the bliss born of pain. It is the root of man's unquenchable need for art as the justification of life. So just one last conclusion. What if any is the value of legal history? There is no doubt as to the answer, to let justice reign, to make visible the senselessness of law in the most forceful ways, and thus welcome in the possibility of justice. In the service of life, the historical artist must tell the harshest truth and spin the noblest lies. And yet, to disclose the beauty and the faithful unfolding of fate and pleasure and the painful agony of existence is the unique faculty of the artist, not the historian at least usually. Great tragedy was such an art at once faithful to the pain and contradiction in life and simultaneously celebratory of what makes human life great and beautiful. For historical art to reveal and revel in its revolting rigor and yet to rouse itself to the resplendent, that is a lie and a what for. But such historical art will of course no longer be history. To sanctify the lie and to love the deception, to embrace the glittering wonder of truth and justice in the stark awareness of its illusion is the highest task of the artist. To see law as power in violence and to glorify its justice all the same, thus does justice overcome itself as mercy, a merciful history borne out of love, an untimely thought from the past, hopefully for the future. We'll take a short break and we'll come back and hear their comments from Professor Conrad. Thank you. Hi, that's our next coordinator. This just asked me to make a very brief announcement to remind us, please would you keep and bring tomorrow your main badges. Particularly if you have lunches to pick up that you've pre-ordered, the badge is in some mysterious way the sign of your entitlement. I think you chose as it should be for the purposes of this afternoon's panel in any case, but I believe functionally it has the ticket in it. So please bring your badges tomorrow. Thank you. Welcome back for everyone who's made it back. And we're going to go ahead for our final session of the commentary and discussion on these four papers. And it's a pleasure to welcome our commentator, John Conrad, who is the Harold H. Swift Distinguished Service Professor of Anthropology and Social Sciences at the University of Chicago. He has written many of his books with Gene Conrad, many more that I can tell you about, but I'll just mention a small sampling of his work on colonialism, law, politics, historical anthropology. He's the author of the 1992 ethnography and historical imagination, the editor of Millennial Capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. And most recently, ethnicity incorporated and work in progress theory from the South or how Europe and America is evolving toward Africa. And he will comment on the papers and then I hope we'll have again a lively discussion. So I'm going to turn it over to John. Thanks, Peter. Speaking of magic. And he said, let there be light and there was light. Light, light, light. He doesn't see me on camera. Is everybody on camera? That's why we can't use it. Oh, well, that's all there is to it. That's fine. Thank you. First of all, like everybody else, thank you to Katherine. Chris is a remarkable event. And especially you, Chris, come home already. I miss you. You can't have him. I like him. Seriously, a lot of my own work in anthropology and the light disciplines have been very well fertilized by a conversation with Chris. I really do miss him. It's great to be back. I have a privilege. I have four quite remarkable papers to read. Those of you who haven't read them and have simply relied on the verbal presentations, I urge you to read them. They three of them aren't really long, but they really repay the effort. In fact, as a member of that sort of wondering cost, the commentator, the discussant, the intuition, as I'm included, I have really actually been privileged to have quite as fine papers. At the same time, I stand here and speak with the youngster, the outsider. I'm not a legal scholar. I am certainly not a historian. And I have not acquired the status here, the hellish status of legal historian. I'm going to be around for apologies. Remember, a practitioner of that discipline that we're told this morning, legal history sort of moved through in one of the stages of infancy? Well, a bit like the ragged, kippling, proto-Indian subject, I'm sort of half devil, half child in this, I guess, and share some of that unrulyness. So forgive me, forgive me for a bit of iconocasm, but forgive me also for a worse sin, which is starting with a cliche. It is that the triangulation of law, of history, of culture has posed troubling questions for a very long time, indeed, from the beginning, with apologies to Elephus Gerald. Herodotus raised it, Sir Henry Main rephrased it, even Clifford Geertz praised it. So let's do it. Let's call it in law. At least by way of its menage, I'll try with history and culture. This in order to take us deep into the heart, no pun intended here, HLA's not in my head and mine. It's a heart not just of the matter raised by Roger Berkowitz about the raison d'etre of legal history, but into a matter of theory and method addressed by Shai, by Asa, and by Peter. Actually, Laby, Milikowski, and Goodrich sound very much like a legal firm in Manchester, I might have to tell you that. It occurred to me that law as fides within it an anagram, rearranged, it reads, as law. What follows is something of a salad. We have presented to us four exceptionally rich papers of feast, but rather diverse feast. And it's one that I do not hope to, nor could not hope to, reduce to a single discourse. Taken together, they pose in highly provocative ways several of the critical questions that face not merely legal history or history sui generis, but the contemporary knowledge industry of large. Taken together, too, they address matters very large, how to explain the dialectics of modernity and in Charlton, for example, the connection of law to culture to matters of less magnitude, like changes in the legal status of Jewish animals slaughter in the 19th century Germany. Although I hasten to add that the historical minutiae to which the papers address themselves are all made to work often quite brilliantly to illuminate big questions. Given the limits of time, it is to the BQs, the big questions that I shall confine my comments. I do so not only more of their presentation, but one of my own making, because it leads as a narrative to the BBQ, the biggest of big questions. Law as, or as Shai puts it at the end of his paper and I quote him, is there a way to think of law neither through the prism of law and nor through the prism of law as? To which one answer implicit in all four papers is yes, plainly it is. And the answer is, law is. Of course, with due respect to a recent past US president, a fair bit depends on what is is taken to mean. But I'll come back to that later. Since I've invoked the final line of Shai's very fine paper, let me begin with his big question. It has to do with modernity and enchantment, or more precisely, with the problems inherent in presuming with Weber that modernity is about disenchantment. The central point of the piece as we all heard is that a barbarian account of Jewish law under the increasingly enlightened conditions of 18th through 19th century Germany would lead us to expect that its practice would become ever less enchanted, ever more secular, ever more rationalized under the purview of the German state, which he says is partly true. But in critical part, it is not. And the critical part is indeed critical. How so? Because that law became increasingly ritualized over the period in question. Now, we may ask Shai why precisely this occurred when it did, which isn't fully explained in the text. But his own concern is with the larger claim, made in reference to an old anthropological argument first enunciated by A.R. Radcliffe Brown almost 90 years ago, that ritualization is contrapuntal to secularization and disenchantment. That it re-enchantments, it infuses mystery, symbolizes in a manner that demands decoding. Shai is careful to situate the trajectory of ritualization and symbolization in an exquisitely nuanced historical account. So far so good. I agree with him very fully that contravader modernity has, indeed, led to a re-enchantment of the law, not only Jewish law, but law-sweet generous. The point, as we shall see, resonates also with Peter's paper too. But I should like to interrogate further the thesis that the anti-tilus of re-enchantment is to be found in ritualization and symbolization. As Shai notes along the way, anthropology is, and I quote him, known for making cultures that are foreign more comprehensible. But it also strives to make that, which is becoming ever more familiar, into something strange, alien, and enchanted. Now, many of my colleagues would argue, of course, that that is because many familiar things are strange, alien, and enchanted and require no help from us. But Shai is correct. Critical estrangement is what we do, and we do it for good reason. Bertolt Brecht also did it, in his case, as a deliberate act of dramaturgy, and called it verfremdum, the effort to de-familiarize, to distance, to astonish, thus to strip the ordinary of itself evident, organryness. I should like to de-familiarize the idea that ritualization and symbolization are necessarily about enchantment, even though they sound as if they are. Contrary to Radcliffe Brown, there is another new anthropological tradition, embodied genealogically in the work of Edward Evans Pritchard, Mary Douglas, Evan Leach, that treats much of ritual and symbolism as largely technical, repetitive behavior. Indeed, Leach saw ritual as a communicative aspect of all behavior, repudiating altogether the dichotomy between the profane and the numinous. And Evans Pritchard showed that even African oracles, which look to outsiders as the most mysterious of magical practices, the numinous practices of ritual manipulations, are regarded, both by adepts and supplicants, as purely pragmatic forensic procedures. As Gene Comerow from now pointed out many times, there is a large difference between ritual, uppercase, and ritualization, lowercase. The latter in many cultural contexts are less about enchantment than they are about habitual ways of doing things. Those of you who know we, the Nasserima, Horace Minas, brilliant essay on American domestic rituals will know exactly what I mean. What is more, another social anthropologist, the venerable Victor Turner, Signature Voice Discipline on Interpretation of Symbols, was willing to say that if a symbol can be decoded, it may be a puzzle, but it's not a mystery, and it is not in itself enchanted. Any more than a World War II German cipher was a thing of the gods. It is only a mystery, a true mystery, it only takes on numinous capacities if it resists decoding and demands interpretation, whose reference can never be fully determined. All behavior is symbolic, but only some of it enchanted. In short, there is no necessary relationship between ritualization and symbolization on the one hand and enchantment on the other. Let me hasten to add that I'm not saying that Shia's argument is wrong. It may indeed be correct. In order to decide, we need to know more about the substance of ritualization here. It's communicative content for those involved, not to mention the numinous dimensions of the symbolic symbolic in German Jewish law. I'm not a stress anti-seviotic, indeed some of these friends are sevioticians, but I need to know something more about the symbolic in order to decide its theoretical status. But as I said, I strongly agree with Shia that modernity has not disenchanted or secularized the law, quite the opposite. In this respect, I think his central thesis is correct and that he's made a master move in going to the very heart of legal modernity in order to make it. But it seems to me that the enchantment of the law is not distinguishable nor opposed to its technical dimensions or its rationalization. After all, modernity has seen the sacralization of the technical, a millennial faith in its capacity to construct by magical means, by tiny magical means, a better world for all, even as it destroys every bit as much as it creates. In short, it is increasing fetishism of the law that in which its enchantments have lain over the long run. By this I mean the attribution to it, to the law, by complex processes of reification, of a life of its own, of a capacity to shape the very forces and the relations that actually shape it, a capacity to make the world in its image, a capacity to determine for both good or ill things that happen in that world. One is reminded of Carlos Fuentes, who makes the point that rights depend on power, on rights, the brilliance of the discourse is to invert the appearance and make it look just the other way. Law, in short, takes on the capacity to commensurate, and here, of course, recall, what modernity is about, is the magicality of commensuration, and thereby to produce rational solutions to what appear to be irrational problems, which is, of course, an entirely enchanted idea. In short, it is in the hyper-rationality of the law that its enchantment lies. Of course, I hardly need to say here, of all places, that modern secular law has always had the quality of a fetish. St. Thomas Aquinas anticipated the point a very long time ago in noting the sacral underpinnings of all natural law. It was to be echoed in Benjamin's critique of the divine violence at its originary core, in Derrida's analysis of the mystical foundations of authority in Agamben's concern to find the key to power in the triangulation of sovereignty, the sacrificial, and the juridical, although all three of them, of course, became in Derrida, Agamben, apprehended the law in narrow terms, eliding it with governance in general and enforcement in particular. Arguably, its enchantment, its numinousness, has only become more pronounced as histories of the past give way to histories of the present, and this is the point to which I shall return later on. First, though, if I may segue into Peter's paper, which picks up on many of the same themes. Peter's stated concern, and I'm citing his written paper rather than the presentation, which is an absolutely exquisite piece of writing and mind-blowing the erudite. Peter's stated concern is why has the history of legal spectacle, of the juristic use of images and performances not yet being written? It's a very good question. That's one that I am ill-equipped to answer. I'll have to establish this now. I'm truly ill-equipped to answer it. But hidden behind that question is another, another BQ. How are we to comprehend without simplifying it the relationship between law and spectacle as mediated by the image? By contrast to shy, Peter is concerned with ritual, uppercase rather than ritualization, lowercase, with sacrality, solemnity, spectrality, even the spirit world. He comes very close to a functionalist contra-focaldian thesis. Lawyers, I quote, need the trappings of sovereignty, the machinations of spiritual causes. Images give law its power and glory, its aura and its effect. No image, no law. Now, of course, there would be a number of people that would debate that position. I had ever find it compelling. In this respect, he's careful to say law is sovereign, it's hierarchical, it's transcendent, it rules, as opposed to the executive, the administrative, the economic, which merely governs. The former belongs to theology, the latter to economy, at least if I understand the argument correctly. Now, structural functionalist anthropology, if I may be permitted the indulgence in my, oh, the history of my own discipline, which, unlike legal history, by the way, has had a lot to say about the theatricality of the law, as long may the argument that an explanation for all this lies in a counterpoint, one which goes back to Shai's title, Law as World. Now, the argument is almost too simple to bear iteration, so please bear with me. Since any social universe, it goes, is predicated upon a metaphysic of order, quotidian enactments of the law, not the death and death of law, are as much about constituting and representing that order as managing any breaches. This, to channel Durkheim, is society worshiping, worshiping its normalizing and normatizing self, thus to reproduce its transcendence as a living abstraction. Durkheim also argued, as did Normans Falling this morning, that it is only with contestation, indeed only with criminality, that law and society actually ever know themselves. But also, and here is the counterpoint, law is the metapragmatic means, the cosmic talktology by which the obligatory is written the desirable, the desirable, obligatory. Now, although Peter doesn't quite make that argument, something fairly close emerges, but this raises the problem of history. For structural functions anthropologists, these were universal truths about law and ritual. It is not always clear when Peter's talking historically and when his history is actually super-historical, above it all, so to speak. Thus, for example, his claim in the written paper, that no law is without hierarchy, no hierarchy without law. Of course, African comparative legal scholars would wonder, how you deal with the new? Were the two of them most the classics of modern comparative legal anthropology? Or, for that matter, in the commentary on MacPherson, again, brilliant commentary, the law everywhere requires publicity, spectacle, theatricality in order to be the law. Well, does it really? Empirically speaking, I can think of several counter-examples. Personal status courts in Egypt, for example, as described quite brilliantly by Hussain Agrahmar, have since the 1970s heard all their cases in private, and there is emerged a jurisprudence under which this has become the law. As Agrahmar notes, there's no easy explanation for this, especially since Egyptian jurisprudence at the time was looking, as it continues to do, Euro-liberal in the extreme. But nonetheless, there's a clue here. It's a clue to which Peter, in fact, himself leaves a trace. Now, he sustains a functional argument for the necessity of imagistic spectacle by pointing out that despite the fact that in the MacPherson case, Justice Tweedie, rather, was excoriated by the Privy Council for rendering a legal process private that he's decree-nisi stood. In short, that the sanctity of the law, the law that rules its sovereignty, was asserted by the Privy Council while the administrative act, i.e. the decision, which is merely administrative, was allowed to stand. Now, the question is, why was that decree-nisi not part of the law? For the litigants, it certainly was. For Justice Tweedie, no doubt, it was. In other words, by what definition is this eliminated from the law? And that becomes an interesting question. And here, I think there is a clue, if I may put Peter Goodridge and Walter Benjamin together. What it reminds me of very clearly is Benjamin's speculations about the admiration for the great criminal and the difference between the great criminal and ordinary crime. Rekor, Benjamin argued that what made the great criminal great was that he or she, Benjamin Repati, that he did not simply break the law, but he offended the law in the uppercase, the definite article, the regime of legality on which the social was predicated. Ordinary crime is just ordinary. It's no less law, but it's not the definite article. Herein lies the distinction between the law and law. Definite article uppercase, the quotidian lowercase. And I think that what Peter is talking about here is the difference between those two things. Between the law, its ritualization, the vimometis, the moments at which the law as regime of knowledge and practice is called into question, enunciates itself and enacts its being and those everyday moments in which it may or may not ritualize itself. And here again, it takes us back to ritualization in precisely the sense that the chai intended, which is again a brilliant insight, which is to say that the law takes its humanist part from its ordinaryness. From the very fact that, and Peter makes Saug with very, very partly in the paper, that hides its humanist quality precisely in the fact that it manages the nature of the world without showing the fact that it is doing it. That of course, again, is the definition of the fetish. Which perhaps explains why, and I don't repeat it, but to this in the presentation, why in fact, there has not been a history of the law as spectacle in America. He blames it, he calls it, a word I've never heard of, adiapherism. Is that how you pronounce it? Adiapherism, today, today, okay? And tomorrow, be the aphorism, and see the aphorism on Sunday, okay? The point being, he argues that it is the pragmatic mindedness of the scholarly academy in the US to which this is attributable. Now, that is probably correct, but the question is why? It seems to me that the answer lies again in the question of law as world, or rather, in its inversion, the world as law. We are living in an increasingly legalized world, and again, I'll come back to that in a moment. And one in which so much of the everyday procedures of life are rendered judicial. Politics, especially in the Commonwealth of South, is entirely judicialized. Citizens are taught to think of themselves as in judicial terms, Chris would have heard me say this. In South Africa, a law train goes around the countryside from remote village to remote village, persuading people to deal with ordinary problems, whether it's ARV drugs, to issues of labor compensation, to not having actually slept with a good partner last night, as legal problem. Your thought that you're made into homo-uralists has become so ordinary again as not to become noticeable that the world has become law. The world has become judicialized in the most quotidian senses. Again, the fetish rises. It is law that will commemorate, it's a law that will resolve everything. In many parts of rural South Africa, people have on their shelves, and all that huts in the countryside, the little red book. The little red book is the redacted constitution, and it usually stands next to the family Bible. It's not anybody looks at or reads it, but its presence is right in the domestic sense. It's right at the heart of the altar and the heart of the domestic domain. In that sense, this is where, to go back, is where the newnessness of the law lies. It's magicality, it's fetish, the notion that it will commemorate. And it seems to me that because law has become this, because the law has become so rare in the context of the everyday, the moments of challenge, that in fact, its spectacular nature belongs to the domain of something else, of faith, sovereignty, et cetera. And hence, it becomes as if we're, slips below, as Bordeaux would have said, below the level of the notice. I would say, in a reflection on this morning's conversation, that much of the discussion, much of the debate that occurred this morning was in effect, or predicated in effect, on a slippage between the law and law. And indeed, it seems to me that if legal history is going to take itself seriously as an analytic and well-founded epistemological practice, sustaining and understanding that distinction, indeed interrogating the relationship between the two things becomes absolutely fundamental. The fact that the world confuses it is understandable. That is where the domain of legal strategy lies. That's where the domain of sovereignty and empowerment lies. Legal Academy, however, is not the world out there. And distinguishing and rendering not deep promiscuizing promiscuities in the world of practice is often what critical estrangement does. That's why anthropologists critically exchange everyday things. Fetishes, their originary form, of course, are cultural objects. So is the law, a cultural object that gives a different article, which takes us directly to Asaf's very thoughtful disposition on the law and culture. Asaf's a little apologetic about it, was at the beginning saying, well, he's really dealing with cases, et cetera. But these are three very interesting cases, and he asked exactly the right question with it. He asked the question, if you take cultural defences, and I'm running out of time, so I was going to talk about cultural defences, which have become epidemic across the world, largely because we've ended Benedictine history, right? Like the history of other nation-states, Benedictine Anderson understood it is over. We now live in plurinations, and cultural defences become epidemic in plurinations. But that's another topic for another time. The question he asked though is, how does law relate to culture? And of course, this is a question that depends largely on one's conception of law, one's conception of culture. Interestingly, Asaf defines culture, he doesn't define law, which seems to me to be an interesting juxtaposition, given the nature of this disposition. Now, he defines it in a way that actually is perfectly acceptable, and all definitions are perfectly acceptable, depending what one argues from them. But it is a very particular definition. Culture is a set of ideas, believe symbols, values, social norms and practices, which are often unconscious, are relatively stable and static, are widely shared by members of a given social group. It is a category, he says, distinct from politics and economics, and of course by extension, from law. Now, again, this is the kind of definition that was very current in anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s. And of course, by definition, by putting outside of itself, social institutions, social practices, social domains, social discourses, like politics, economics, and the law, it then creates a problem that Chai has had to address, what are the relationships between the two? And as he says, and I think he's absolutely right, if you define culture in that way, there is no theoretically principled answer to that question. It will always be indeterminate. Why? Because in effect, they don't exist as exterior institutions of one another, they part-hole relations. There is no law that isn't within culture. Let's say, there are no terms by which law can construct itself without being within culture. Now, contemporary anthropological definitions of culture pay much more attention to its openness, to the fact that the culture is a field of signifying practices that are variably empowered, power-wise within culture, not outside of politics, always in here, in the cultural, just as cultural in here, in the political. So both signs are differentially empowered. Some signifying practices are hegemonic. Some are ideological and open to contestation. Some are the object of consciousness. Some are the object of unconsciousness. And indeed, the way that those fields play themselves out literally is the ground on which the struggle over culture, the struggle over law, in fact, itself takes shape. Now, there is, again, a large literature on exactly how these things do play themselves out. And I won't repeat them now, except to make the point that if one is to understand the relationship between law and culture, it begins by situating law within culture and then asking the question, what is the relationship between the two, not culture and, but how within culture is law made? How is it transformed? How does it take on its hegemonic qualities? When and under what conditions is it contested? And by what means? And in the process, how, in turn, does it shape culture? This is a very Jejechean problem, which is to say culture, by virtue of being, at least law, by virtue of being within culture, is never containing tidiness. It can never be a reflection, no more than a wheel can be a reflection of a motor car. There's a part-hole relationship to them. They make each other in dialectically open ways. They used to say, their relationship is always one of excess, one of contestation, one of politicization. That, after all, is what the struggle for the law is. To me, as a mere anthropologist, the law is a sight of struggle. It's not a thing at all. It takes on its definite article purely by a moment of reification, which is always unstable, which has been contested at the very moment of its enunciation. That is precisely why ritual with a capital R only inheres in the moments of that definition, the moment of reification, which, of course, like all dialectics, contains the seeds of its own internal contestation. I hasten to add this to anybody who misunderstand me, that I'm not using dialectics in the Hegelian, or the Marxian sense, but rather in a post, actually a post-Marxian sense, which, hence, which always contains excess, always contains indeterminacies, always contains superfluities, and it is those things, and understanding and theorizing and ethnographizing those things, and particularly ethnographizing those things, because, after all, the production of knowledge with apologies to Nietzsche is always a dialectic between inductive and deductive. Again, an undetermined one. It is only that by which legal history makes itself interesting as an intervention in theory. Whatever else it may do to be an intervention in theory, figuring out the nature of that dialectic, of its superfluities, of its excesses, of its redundancies, of its indeterminacies, as well as its determinations, is what makes legal history interesting to the world beyond itself. And it is profoundly interesting for the world beyond itself, particularly because of the contemporary fetishization of the law. Now, I'm running out of time, so let me turn, finally, because it actually does take us, finally, to Roger's, again, very impressive reflection. I got to speak to him this morning about it on the breakfast, and I already said to him that it may not have been published, but it's going to be cited in the chapter in his book already, because it really raises some extremely interesting reflection, not merely on Nietzsche, but on the question of why knowledge regains the law, Now, of course, what Roger's B-Q is the B-B-Q of all, the biggest question of all, and that is what is legal history actually for. And in that sense, it is a reflection that illuminates all of the other things that we've spoken about, and it does so in very interesting way, because all of these other three papers actually provide, I think, quite profound answers to that question. Roger's own answer is one I agree with absolutely. If I may, however, a friendly amendment which is an expansion. His answer is, and it's the likely direct, just as his paper is an aesthetic and analytic delight, it is quotes to make visible the senselessness of law. Now, as I say, I agree fully if we may add to senselessness, again with Benjamin, it's those laws inherent capacity for violence, for erasure, for juricide, for killing by legal means. But following what I've just said in response to Asaf, following the effort to conceptualize culture as I have, there is a further step to making visible the senselessness of the law, one which evokes a very powerful ghost, the ghost of Frantz Fanon. It is to make visible the processes too by which the forms of the law in all their ritualized uppercase and ritualized lowercase geysers become portrayed as sensible, become the hegemonic that taken for granted means by which right is exercised, by which property is made private, by which violence is sublimated into right. After all, the trick of senselessness is its own inversion. That again is the trick of the fetish. It makes the appearance of a camera obscura or to real. The senselessness of the law, after all, is its newness quality. It is its capacity to elude easy interpretation, but the process by which it becomes normalized, by which it becomes hegemonized, by which it becomes homogenized and rendered into precisely the mistake that we all make, the promiscuous movement between the law and the law becomes thinkable and possible, which finally takes me to one last comment. And that is the question of law and, through law as, to law is. Now, to the degree that the world is law and the world is increasingly becoming law, the question isn't, I think, law and or law as. It is what we understand and how we theorize the world once the world, once law is the world and the world is law. Once it becomes increasingly true that that illusion, and it is an illusion, of course, because a lot of it exists outside of it, but nonetheless, the degree to which that illusion takes hold. A record errant from beyond the chains of illusion is the challenge of all critical scholarship, of all estrangement, of all defamiliarization, of effremantle, of astonishment. And if there is any truth in whatever it is history pursues, then presumably that is what we have to decode, why precisely law is. What it means to say that law is, when the world becomes law, what sorts of analytic and critical and especially challenges of estrangement that poses the scholarly community, not only of the legal history, but across the entire knowledge regime of which we will partake. Is it common for a woman or should we go ahead and ask other people that hit them long? Yeah, sure. I think that you're supposed to be able to hear me. Okay, but can you hear me? The question is with us. It should be Mike. It can't be Mike. It should be Mike. That's a Mike, supposedly. Is it? No. Okay. It's not even going to be Mike. Okay. Thanks, this is great. You brought the papers together. I just want to briefly respond to the question, the small question you're referring to me, then the BQ, BBQ, I'm sure other people will have some things to say on degree. So you ask, and I think that's a really important question, when I talk about virtualization, I'm talking about two different things. I'm talking about symbolization, and I'm talking about the enchantment, or I'm talking about, and you're saying they're not the same. So, and you cite anthropological theories that suggest that, and they exist, and I'm sure they're right. So, the short answer, or the specific answer, is that in the text that I'm studying, sort of the historical text that I'm studying, the two are brought together. So that would be the easy answer, so that these processes take place together historically. Now, there's another question, whether they belong together conceptually. And there, I'm not sure, but I'd like to begin to think about this. That is that enchantment creates a two-fold world. That the practice is not the law itself, but rather there's an other world in which the practice has its meaning. So, the slaughter of the animal is not the real thing, the real thing is re-implementation of souls. Now, symbolization splits the world into two in a different way, but still splits the world into two and allows for the enchantment. The symbolization says that practice is not the practice. The practice symbolizes something else that we need to account for. And so, there is this duality that is open that then allows for an enchantment or not, but that that possibility is implicit in the symbolization. So, that's a point, and I thank Lord for that. The second point is about theories of rationalization and ritualization or enchantment and disenchantment. And here, just briefly, I think that the distinction cuts through sociology of law and history of law. So, we have Vega on the rationalization side and Durkheim in the discussion of society as God on the enchantment, and then we have Foucault and Adam Ben and Kelsen and Schmidt and Ahmet and Benjamin and Rashul and what would have you. But there are theories that try to secularize and rationalize, and there are theories that try to understand law and other things by enchanting them. And I think that this distinction is important, even though I accept what you say that is that rationalization has an enchantment effect in itself, and I think that's a very important point, but different from the one that I was making. And then, the last one that I just wanted to make briefly, and I'll probably come back in the discussion, and it refers both to your general commentant, specifically to Roger's paper. And that is that you say, and Roger says the same in his paper, in a stuff that's too, the law is always culture. And by that we understand that it belongs to the realm of the human, that it's human-made by culture, or Roger says history is human-made, and this is how we need to understand it, as an activity, as a being, as a life. But religion poses a question about that. And it should form a question, even for us who are not religious and don't care about religion at all, and that is the possibility that we think about law, not as man-made, and about history, not as man-made, and about culture as a specific reading of law and history, as man-made. And so then the question is what happens when we allow ourselves to think of law, not as divine and, of course, too secular for that, but as given, or as history is given, or not culture, because culture is already, has this notion of human-made, man-made. But so these are the questions that open themselves, and then it would be a critique of secularism to raise these questions and to show how, for instance, to think that the role of the thinker or the scholar or the scientist is to question ritual with capital L, to show ritual with small L, or to do the same and to criticize fetishism. It's part of a secularist reading of law, and understanding that what we need to be doing is secularized understanding of law. And the question is what would be alternative to that, which is not on the enchantment side. Let's open that to our patient audience, and I guess we can take these over at their people. It's all because we didn't have coffee at the break. I don't know if we can count on this one. All right, all right. Barbara Welke, is it on? Yes. Barbara Welke, no, it's about, no, it's, Barbara Welke University of Minnesota. I have a very particular question for us all. I'm struck in the privacy case about the sexual injury in the language, which really, and the place I first noticed it, one place, just a second. And then I started looking for, oh, okay, so here. On page 62, at the bottom, you say rushing into the county house it spreads wide the ledger. And then I started going back and looking, you know, at all of the other language. And I was really, I said, it's something as powerful, and I wondered about it, and I wondered what you thought about that. I think that images actually exist both in the sources and also in the theoretical, modern discussion of the story of the dynasty and the story of the state is penetrating and kind of violating the private sphere. So it's actually something that's also historical, but also kind of more than to look at the relationship between the state as a subject in its general language. I kind of, it wasn't a major thing for me. Obviously, it would have implications about the relationship between culture and tax vibrancy in the sense that it does kind of show you that I didn't think culture. The outside is kind of the primary source of the story. It's not a story about war being at a place where images are constructed. I haven't kind of done any, it's not a major point for my story, which is the power of privacy is still not exploited. It's been ongoing and kind of just barely scratched itself. So once you kind of think about this issue, which nobody has attempted to kind of study properly, I think that a lot of the stories of privacy which focus on the relationship, the history of the life of privacy in the 19th century in the relations between individuals, but the history of privacy in the state, especially in the context hasn't been eroding yet. So for me, kind of a justice is just a report of preliminary collection of some of the sources and I haven't done this yet. I was just kind of reporting that I found a problem in the relationship between culture and law in this topic too. And thinking about the gender aspects of the language and what type of images are used and what do they say about the relationships and how to do oneself and correct all the sources. And I also have to do a comparative, once I want to do it and compete, the project will hopefully be comparative and look at the difference between the United States and the UK and hopefully some of the difference, say, will also be a gender difference. For example, there's far more policy aspects in the United States until late 19th century. It may have had a connection to images of the American and it's different than the English and some of them. But tell me, there's something really nice and there are a lot of layers that have to be studied and I have some questions. No. Is that it? Oh, yeah. OK, that worked. Yeah, I just wanted to pick up on Barbara's comment because it seemed to me that there are a number of maybe submerged gendered stories here. And I've been noting some of the language, I mean, not only in the task piece, but in the man-made culture and more generally in the many juxtapositions we have of what seems like a masculine law and a feminine culture. And also in the spectacle that we have here as well, I noted in conversation with several people as well, that Theory Day here at Legal History Conference is one of our fellow conference goers. Looks like a barbershop quartet, we had a lot of male theory and I might break into doo-wop over here as the girl's finger, but otherwise I'm keeping time. I think we might think something about some of the subtext of rethinking about this. But I'll take more audience. What do you say? We can hear you. So I was curious about this when I was reading Peter's paper and then John, when you were talking about the Egyptian courts that happened when I was reading the paper, I was thinking that the Supreme Court and the debates among the justices about whether to open up, to televise the oral arguments and most of the justices add that they not be televised. And I was thinking that spectacle can also be anti-spectacle, that the very inaccessibility, the very privacy, the very fact that you don't have access to it, that it is a special place with its own rituals, with its own practices that are not actually open to the public is part of what makes that spectacle so effective and powerful. That's what they believe. At least the justices believe that something is at stake in publicizing and broadening the scope of the downability of their oral arguments. Maybe that's not true, but they seem to have something invested in the belief that the privacy endows them with greater power in some ways. I just want to read you about it, but both of you can do that. Both of you. John and me. Oh, John. Go ahead, John. My answer is yes. I think that there are any number of contexts in which privacy and closure empowers the law. And again, definite article. But I think Peter's point is really important, which is to say there are any number of contexts in which the absence of the image, the withdrawal of the image, hints at a formal publicity by virtue of erasing it. And I think that's exactly what happens in the Supreme Court instance. We all know they there. We've been given any number of imagistic bases in order to think that. But the withdrawal of the image becomes an enunciation of its power. And Peter actually argues that in the latter part of the paper. That's one of the reasons I suggest reading it. But I don't want to answer for you, Peter, because you have a much better one than do I. So I hope people don't normally have trouble hearing me. So if the peculiarly male of the device that could be put away. The image, television cameras came into the American courtroom in the McCarthy hearings on the back of war crimes trials. And there's an amazing history of how both at Nuremberg and in the McCarthy hearings, the camera brings the world into the courtroom. And the problem with that, and the McCarthy hearings, if you look at the footage, you're quite extraordinary, is that it distracts and it decomposes the highly regimented theatrical order of legal proceedings. So a court and a trial that doesn't have the camera is a court and a trial in which everybody has their place, except when the judge jumps off the bench. It is known who is talking to whom and in what order and indeed in what language. So I think the Supreme Court's fear is precisely a fear of the interdisciplinary of the outside, of taking away of this control and a movement of culture society visibly into the courtroom. As to the holding of hearings in private, and all of this interest in the image comes curiously with a feminine accent. Janus Anglorum, or Janie Anglorum, which is Seldin's book about common law, the feminine in common law, precisely in that title, arrives loosely at the same time as the translations of the Egyptian hieroglyphs and haripolo and the einigmata at a time when the image is something feminine. The image is a woman, the image is a face. I mean, there's a fascinating theological kind of denunciation of the image precisely for this opening up. But I guess the way that I would see the camera, which is coming, which is coming because every laptop has a camera, every phone, but particularly the laptop because courts want to be on the internet. So they are visible. You just have to turn the laptop towards them as it were. I think that it's simply a matter of time What does that mean? Well, I think that's good for us because it takes away that highly regimented theatrical control and broadens it into something that is less amenable to this textual solemnization and this very rigid hierarchy of performance, which is still being held on to. Just going to have a footnote. The notion of Nuremberg and the McCarthy era is very interesting because those are both moments in which the law is in question. And Nuremberg specifically was about creating a new notion of a legal regime. Of course, McCarthy was about the ostensible potential destruction of American law. So those are two really interesting images in which law in the uppercase and ritual in the uppercase do converge in the publicity of the image. On the other hand, the banalization of what's a judge duty and judge whatever has led to any other discourse. Is this really law or is it just basically daytime comedy? And again, in effect, that's raised a very interesting question about precisely whether this is really the law if it is made public in this kind of banalized notion. And there's, again, another sort of Benjamin subtext there too. I don't know why Benjamin is so much around today. Normally isn't that much around in my life. There is really the auto mechanical reproduction and the rendering of the banal does raise the question of what exactly is the law and what is the law. You're right, I agree with this one. Just to, the judge duty might be, one reading of her might be evidence of an everyday appetite for despotism in a world where we are all instruments and allow our agents given the civilization of technology. But that's actually sort of, well, that's sort of a segue into what I was talking about. Thanks for that. And that is, in the thematic of the civilization of technology as the sort of mark of the modern, I wanted to ask a question to maybe to tie us to the theme, to our warnings panel. One of the things I hope will discuss is our warnings panel. And that is the question of embeddedness to use the term that Paul Polanyi uses. You can shy, I think that's, in some ways, you've framed your questions in the very question of enchantment, secularization. But I'll soften shy, I think you're both asking questions about embedded life and that sort of way of being in the world, that we don't have any categories to describe anymore because we've already been disenchanted. So to give you an example, from my case of colonial law in India, and this speaks, I think, especially to a sauce point, or questions about a long culture, I would say that at least to think about the ways in which cultural defenses and culture as a name for politics, or what Arjuna Patherai would call culturalism. The use of culture in that way, for me at least, and you'll hear more this tomorrow, is the effect of a certain kind of civilization of the technical, which is the institutionalization of that thing we call the economy. And you can't think, and of course, you know, FNSE Inc. is sitting right here, so I don't need to learn, I'm afraid this is going to end much. You can really come out of books, this is very unfortunate. Yeah, but, so I really think that the third category there for thinking long culture is economy. We have to, in this context. So to just give you one example of the ways in which we might do, say, a genealogy of the idea of a gift and to traumatize your wacko figure that you talked about, in the late 19th century of India, there is an incredible amount of acrobatic jurisprudence over the institutionalization of law, warming, to establish a gift given in perpetuity. And this becomes a real problem because the richest people in India work in telegroups, vernacular capitalists, as I call them, establish indigenous forms of social welfare like temples, rest houses for travelers, religious travelers, cows, shelters, et cetera. All of these are dedicated to deities and all of these generally have vast tracts of land that bring rent, an income and rent. Now the income of that rent can always be used to, even if you give a gift for social welfare, can be used to defer a debt in your family firm. It can be used to set up more retail locations. It can be used for credit and then it will always return but the fact is there's a porous boundary between what is considered social welfare and what is considered profit. What the legal acrobatics of the British do in a series of high court decisions in the late 19th century from the British Council on the Long Way High Court in particular, is trying to figure out how you can establish a law of warming to a gift that will be given in perpetuity that can never revert back to the family. How can you pull up these things as trust and warming? And the way they do it is by defining the Hindu deity, the idol as they call it, as a legal subject, okay? And that, that is the fetishization that John Paramov is talking about. So they produce the idol as a legal subject. A legal subject whose intention can be discovered in the sort of interest in maintaining his house or her house without matter of poly. It's also good. And so, I give this as an example of the ways in which a kind of secular, technical worldview recodes an embedded way of life in which the distinction between public and private and in the 19th century, the Church of the Downsack to 1890 in India, established as defined charity as a gift for general public utility. Public utility is the category of public versus private is absolutely a play there. So how do you even think about these practices or these numois that don't apply in public privatization? They don't apply categories of charity and profit. So I think it's just a big way, it's another beauty here. How do you think embeddedness? I just want to introduce that as he's an anthropological question perhaps, more than anything else. And I just said a quick question for Peter because it was so compelling, Icon and Boikas. And if Boikas is the realm of technique, I would love for you to elaborate on if you can or if you thought about it on law as media. We've talked about law as technique, but I wonder if you'd like to have something to say about law as media. That is to say, the icon as, not just an image, but as a medium. I'll start with the first. I'm sorry. I'm just saying, so the story is basically a story of modernity is a simulation of the spheres of the world, the economy and culture, emerging this distinct and culture, doesn't appear until the economy kind of takes over something that belongs to the family or to groups that are not in the state. Only a solid notion of culture. Yeah, I believe that. Yeah, I certainly kind of like, I can buy the story. I'm shy to buy it because it's a very, very strong one. So very briefly, so I buy the story as half of the story in the question of the other half, which is when, for instance, religion is not translated or decoded into secular forms, but rather discovered as religion hence lies beyond the law and receives sort of protection by the law as religion. And that's the other side of this, I'm sure we agree. The embeddedness, I think that's helpful and goes along, I guess, with what's being said. But then the question is, what happens to this category of embeddedness when it's not about a post-colonial situation? That is, what happens, again, with Jews in Germany? So then you could say that they're being, that they have their culture and it's being sort of an influence way. So it is being appropriated by Christian understandings that possibility. I'm not sure that that's what happens because that takes agency from the Jews and the German Jews are German Jews, like the German Christians. And so it's much harder to say that this is something that happens outside of the embeddedness. This is, right now, so the question is what happens and I think there's an embeddedness of what happens when all this that we're talking about is what is embedded, that it is. And that's exactly what happens. Well, that's of the interesting fact. It doesn't undo the category of embeddedness. It's actually even more interesting, I think. I just wanted to kind of, following your answer, just kind of a question that we presented in the paper is what extent, I don't remember if it appears in the paper, but what extent is the whole story of Protestantism versus Catholicism? Because I think it's associated actually with a battle, kind of the Jews on a proxy fold, actually a battle which is not totally unrelated to Judaism and it's an internal Christian battle between, you know, rising Protestant state and Protestantism was seen as medieval on Judaism. I think that that is part of the story. It's not, I can't tell the full story because it's beyond, but the Hebris are mostly Protestants who criticize Judaism for being Catholic. Can I just add one point? I think there's a lot of important stuff in what you just said. We have a long conversation about it. Just two points, though. One is precisely the point you make about culture here and this is really, it is a very complicated issue because of course the term culture as a circulating possessed object exists within cultural fields in which culture itself becomes marked, very much like the law and the law and the law. And the way that that happens of course is deeply complicated. There are also situations in which culture as a political claim is quite different from culture as an inhabited field of significations and that congealing itself leads to a kind of promiscuity and politically, especially among anthropologists who talk about those two modalities of culture as if they were the same thing or a historical progression, which they're not. They exist with one another in an embedded way but in historically and problematically embedded ways and in part, of course, also by the deification of economy. Deification of economy and the two market-funded mentalism is one of those signifiers that actually tells more than it seems to tell. And in fact, one of the reasons we wrote a book called Millennial Capitalism was precisely about the growing faith. Well, that is what neocon servitism is about. It's about a faith in the salvific effects of capital to resolve everything. Capital, of course, deeply legalized, which is interesting and I think the place where this becomes really interesting in relation to Shai's story is, of course, the rendering by the Pakistani courts of Islam's intellectual property where ever since 1994, now Islam is intellectual property. You can't simply build a mosque or goodness knows, alienate a symbol. Those things are wholly owned and in fact, the judges in the case said this form of alienation is a material harm to Muslims just as the God Shiva has, in fact, sued in court. So these things become embroiled in, as it were, the sacralization of the economy, which has its own effects on the relationship between cultures as possessing cultures as a few signifiers. So, can I, should I reply maybe a little bit? Maria, would that be all right? Do I have time? I'll just talk if that's okay. I have kind of three thoughts. I'm not quite sure where you were taking it. The first is that there's an amazing study of Latin, of course, within the sort of universal tradition of Western law, as it's so called. The medium was Latin. And there's a study of exams taken, or amongst other things, of exams taken by children in grammar and secondary schools throughout Europe in Latin, at a time when the kids were doing between 20 and 40 hours of Latin a week, this kind of rope crunch. And the historian's conclusion, female historian, was that having looked at these exams about one in eight students had any working comprehension of Latin whatsoever. So, the function of learning Latin was as a symbolic code and as a way of saying that we studied and belonged to those who have studied Latin, but not that it could ever be used in any practical sense. So, there's that remarkable power of these signs that mean nothing, these signs that hold a value that is not in any sense, a literal value. And I think that fits quite nicely with kind of one of the ways in which we should think of lawyers and of the fictions that you're talking about, which was described in the Renaissance with a very fond of legal fictions that, you know, the ship was in Barcelona, two-way London was a common sort of pleading. You have all these kind of devices, male to female and so on. There's a common one that's been repeated quite recently. So, lawyers are euphanticists. Lawyers are fiction mongers. Lawyers are able to generate a discourse that has only the most tangential of relationships to anything other than itself. And that, in a sense, is how the medium develops. Then, there's a theological and there's a practical dimension because an image is something that is defined by lawyers as a mode of concealment. Now, there's an image is a way of concealing and a word is a way of concealing as well as promulgating. And the third point is the lawyers did become very obsessed with the advent of print with the medium and with the interconnection between iconomists and iconomists precisely because you can't promulgate law in Latin. You can't promulgate law in texts. So, there was, for 200 years, the most popular, one of the most popular forms of book was the legal emblem book. And that precisely has these images, amazing images. And you find a lot of texts. I mentioned Cook has a picture of Littleton and the Seven Orders of the Propositors' Lineage and so on. It has a picture of the law book itself on a cushion. It has a number of images and some of the continental books, even more so with color and Francis pieces, Hobbeses, Francis pieces, a very sort of significant one. There are plenty of others, but the emblem books in particular are the legal harders, in a sense. This is the response to Haripolo and the Enigmata The fact that law is a sacred knowledge which you're now presenting in the vernacular. So, how do you do both? How do you allow that paradox? And the emblem book is one of the most fascinating examples because it has all these tears. The emblem book is an image that everyone can draw from and it's a jurisprudential normative image. And at the same time, it will generally have a Latin motto which is obviously incomprehensible and then it will have a vernacular verse which will explain at an intermediate level because literacy is not that widespread as between and these are books that would be read and these are books that can be seen and then it dies. The reason I was thinking about it in a completely other way was I'm thinking about economy and celebrity and media. And the celebrity is an icon, so I'm thinking of icon and fetish and media and the fact that that's... That's the aclometry and the angelogical and that's precisely, I mean, the definition of honor is celebritas. And you'll find that in all of the early law books and then celebrity has its colors. So People Magazine, you know, you see everyone in their clothes and in these books, it'll tell you who can have which, you know, the red and the purple of the higher echelons of the nobility and so on and then you can choose your images but you can't take other people's images and so on. So it is precisely a coding of celebrity. I have a couple of questions about the relation between history and law and either a spectacle or a specter, the way that it came up, several of the papers. So at the end of yours, Peter, where you talk about how you've done a history that of something that never was, right, or something you talk about as an unwritten history, very stark by that. And I'm wondering, in that history, two things. What's the relation between the image and the theatricality and what's the relation of that history to the history that Roger was describing? Are you in line with that? Or is it a different kind of history than the one Roger describes as somehow ennobling through noble lives and whatever else it takes, the activity of life? And then for Roger, I was just wondering, and it was very quick what you talked about and I think it was in the paper about the revenge point that you made, about how revenge gives us justice and justice or somehow injustice exceeds law. What's that that exceeds law in this world? And then, is that excess the same as what Shine was talking about in his response to John, as what it is that these anthropological and historical accounts can give us access to? And is that, I didn't quite get in a soft paper, but I'm sure this might- They're all close to the door. No, no, there's one for each of them. They can choose if they want to give us. And then in a soft paper, at the end, when you say, oh, so now I have to do rhetoric, otherwise we're in danger of something that sounds like you're associating the specter with the causal account of culture. What does that have to do with your beginning example of that magician's case, right? Because what isn't being spoken there seems to be very different than what anyone else is not speaking of. And I'm just wondering if any or all of you want to address those. And I honestly, it's not at all as a criticism just because I'm just trying to figure out is there a way that I can put this panel together in a different way than the wonderful way in which I'm talking about it. What's this? Here's no way to ask. Yeah, yeah. No, they weren't asking a question. Sorry. You're going to start rather? I'll say something. Yeah. I think that I think that when John says that, to make visible the senselessness of law and when Shai says, do I need this? Yeah. When Shai says that I need to, that I said that law is always culture or history is human made. I don't think I was saying that and maybe Marianne's question allowed me to say sort of why. So when someone takes revenge, okay? Montecristo, just to take an example, many of us will know. He makes the claim to be the not of Christ. He makes the claim to be holy. He makes the claim that his judgment is divine and he makes it explicitly. And he makes it not as a lawyer. He makes it, as he says, over and over again in the text as an artist. As someone, and that raises the question of what an artist is. Shai suggested, and I think rightly so because Nietzsche at times goes on both sides of this. I may have to make it clearer where Nietzsche is and where I am, but there is at least a higher area in the Nietzschean art where the artist is simply a rapturous conduit for a holy, the realm of the holy. The argument that I'm trying to, are you making a book about the excess of justice, the excess in this justice, that justice is always an extraordinary act and not one that can be done for the law but has to be done by someone and acting personally and individually is that the Avenger, the person who takes revenge makes a claim to be doing that which cannot be rationalized. That which cannot be rationalized in the court of law or by procedures, et cetera. They just make a claim to do justice. At which point, it is up to the viewers, the spectators to decide whether the claim was right or not. They either accept the Avenger as just or they can say that the Avenger was an active in-justice. And the best place that that happened which sort of the argument goes is through a jury trial where the question of jury multiplication comes up. But, you know, as Harnett says in discussing the Schwarzschilder case of 1927 when he kills this headlora that had not on the pogroms and then gives himself up and puts him on himself on trial that is how one does justice by first killing yourself and then putting yourself on trial letting people say that what he did is justice or not. And so I don't think that's, I don't think that's man-making justice. I think what that is is us recognizing that if justice is going to appear in the world, it's going to appear in an extraordinary act in which we do justice and then that justice community recognizing that for them or not by others. In a sense, what I'm trying to say is that it's only an art that religion can happen, not in science or not in discourse. It's only in standing and letting oneself be and making a claim to be a conduit for a higher group, a non-discursive form of justice that we can actually have the possibility of a religion in the world. And also for justice. And that's the claim that I'm making. So that, and the lying as there is to come, yes, we make a holy lie, we lie that we do justice, we lie that we're God. But we know that's a lie. And yet the lie has to be beautiful enough, the act of justice, the revenge has to be beautiful enough to be believed and that's what keeps justice alive in the world. That's the claim that I'm trying to make. My specific goals has to do with with the quotation, the taxis tones that you're writing about and kind of refers to 19th century, you know, old antiquated 19th century notions of the college, you know, so. And you know, I didn't have time to present everything kind of in there. So it's just an attempt to create some sort of that with people doing taxis today. And now in ways that don't take into account the more complex notion of that. So the image and theater just very quickly, the Roman digest, as you know, bans theater for 200 years. What's it banning? It's banning foreign Greek history on it. Imitations or competitions with law. So theater in legal terms, theater and justicia is the discourse of jurisdiction. It's the discourse in other words of getting onto the stage and the image is surely the theatrical mass, the medium through which one can get onto that stage. And that is sort of to be a person in law, actually in law French is to be a person which I love it's to be a priest because you represent things parochial and to become a person and to have a space within the jurisdiction. You need to have that mask and you need to have that acclamation. Well, the image is the medium and the role through which one can participate in jurisdiction through which one can act and you know, precisely for Cicero again and they have to tell you is the lawyer's act Torres. Do we have other questions, comments? There was one here, yeah. So are you all. Well, I think we should thank our panel for us.