Legal Memories And Amnesias In America's Rhetorical Culture (Polemics Series) [Hardcover]

Marouf Arif Hasian (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 17, 2000 | ISBN-10: 0813366011 | ISBN-13: 978-0813366012

In Legal Memories and Amnesias in America's Rhetorical Culture, Marouf Hasian, Jr. critically examines the rhetoric of law--specifically, the shifting lines between the notions of liberty and license. Hasian, Jr. explores how issues such as immigration, labor, national identity, race, and genetics have caused society to change how it thinks about, and uses, laws.The author builds on critical race theory, feminist studies of the law, and critical legal studies, and he uses a case study framework that covers topics such as Sarah Roberts and the separate but equal doctrine, John Brown's enactment of natural law at Harper's Ferry, Typhoid Mary Mallon, the Holocaust, Susan Smith, the human genome project, and Rosewood. All of the aforementioned are tied together by an introduction that clearly delineates the basic theoretical stance of the book. Without a doubt, the subject of this book is provocative, timely, and timeless.

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About the Author

Marouf Hasian, Jr. has a J.D. and a Ph.D. and currently teaches in the Communications Department of the University of Utah.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 232 pages
• Publisher: Westview Press (February 17, 2000)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0813366011
• ISBN-13: 978-0813366012
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6.2 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,981,518 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE LAW IS A LEGAL FICTION; OUR COURTS A LETHAL CIRCUS AND A THEATRE OF THE ABSURD, February 10, 2007

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This review is from: Legal Memories And Amnesias In America's Rhetorical Culture (Polemics Series) (Hardcover)

This book now seven years old should be required reading for each and every citizen of a democratic society, and ours too.

The author Dr. Hasian, with an additional doctorate in the Law, demystifies legal rhetoric and demands transparency for every citizen. He brilliantly reviews the history of law in America, including the Rosewood incident, Leo Frank, Holocaust trials, Typhoid Mary and quarantine, and John Brown declaring Natural Law at Harper's Ferry. He uncovers a "deep chasm between the principles of law and their dissemination in the public sphere" and protests the "Artificial boundaries . . . created between "principles" and mere opinion, judicial and "extrajudicial claims, the "rule of Law" and politics."

Interestingly this important polemical work was published in the year 2000, just before the interventionist Scalia-OConnor-Thomas-Rhenquist court threw our national elections, and before the invention of the legal issues surrounding Guantanamo, the suspension of Habeus Corpus, Abu Graibh, the violations of the War Powers Act, and the suspension of the United States Consitution by the current self-imposed administration. This book could be written to address each of these issues, unimaginable then. Or, rather, this book, and this author, would no longer find a publisher.

This courageous and insightful author guides us through this well footnoted book to become "skeptical of the claims of empowered decision makers who argue that they alone understand the "rule of law" while others misinterpret jurisprudental standards." He demands in our common and democratic social contract that all citizens be heard in the making and enforcing of the law, as our founders require of us. He supports his insights with equally brilliant quotations, including this from Peter Goodrich:

"Law is a literature which denies its literary qualities. It is a play on words which asserts an absolute seriousness; it is a genre of rhetoric which represses its moments of intention or fiction; it is a language that hides its indeterminacy in the justificatory discourse of judgment; it is a procedure based upon analogy, metaphor and repetition, and yet it claims to being a cold or disembodied prose. . . . It is in short, a speech or writing which forgets the violence of the word and the terror or jurisdiction of the text."

In short there is only one eternal, universal and infallible law for all peoples at all times, one of whose very simple clauses reads:

Thou shalt not kill.

I look forward to and pray for the good Doctor's update of this excellent and correct assessment of man's arbitrary and politicized law and its unjust application in our times. The situation has only become much worse.