Law and Societies

Professor Fitzpatrick offers an examination of bourgeois legality as the concrete embodiment of modern law. Citing examples from the prison system and the workplace, he finds that modern law exists in certain relations of opposition and support with other social forms. From these relations, certain modes of convergence and separation between law and other social forms are identified and explored. To test the utility of this analysis, Fitzpatrick provides an extended application to traditional scholarship about the nature of law and its relation to society. The central focus in this enquiry is the idea of integral plurality as a vehicle by which the abstracted, unitary and universalistic pretensions of the modern legal system may be exposed