What are the affordances of attending to cultural objects as sources engaged in the study of legal processes? Writers past and present– from Franz Kafka, to Sara Uribe, to David Foster Wallace, to Valeria Luiselli– have turned towards text (and invested in the production of cultural objects more broadly) in order to reckon with both the “rule of law” as a principle, and with the tensions that its administration raises, in practice. What to make of the steadily growing archive of work grappling with contemporary experiences of legal institutionalization?  

Legal institutionalization in the administrative state may take various shapes, which include the bureaucratic. As a category, bureaucracy can be invoked as a foil for both politics and justice. Yet at the same time, rules and procedures are the mechanisms for recognition as a bearer of rights. David Graeber signals towards the omnipresence of bureaucratic processes and the arbitrariness of the logic that underpins them, for example, referring to bureaucracy as “the water in which we swim.” The pervasiveness of bureaucracy as a mode of governmentality restages fundamental questions of justice and citizenship not in the courtroom or the ballot box, but in the administrative office and the hold queue. Former immigration judge Dana Leigh Marks, for example, describes asylum proceedings as “death penalty cases argued in traffic court settings.” 

In the face of growing critique of legal institutionalization and bureaucratic “red-tape,” how to examine the relationship between the application of the law and of human rights today? Jacques Derrida’s interrogation of the paradoxical differential between “law” and “justice,” elaborated in “Force of Law” and elsewhere, bears revisiting in this context. In “Force of Law,” Derrida called for a “desedimentation of the superstructures of law that both hide and reflect the economic and political interests of the dominant forces of society.” We seek to extend this line of inquiry into the liminal spaces and procedures of law which characterize the contemporary. This task is of particular interest during the attenuated passage from a global power politics of neoliberal consensus, to what may provisionally be termed an era of hyperpolitics, in Anton Jäger’s words.  

We invite prospective participants to consider how written (literary, poetic), visual (film, photography), artistic, and other sources address and react to the administration of the law as an urgent issue of our time. More broadly, this call seeks to bring together scholars, artists, advocates, and legal practitioners invested in approaching the study of the law within the humanities. Possible approaches may include comparative study of legal processes, synchronically across language and geography or diachronically across history. While the organizers attend to these questions in the immigration legal context, we encourage proposals within and beyond it.