Speaker: Oishik Sircar
Contradiction is the commonsense condition of law (and life) and yet the discipline of law (much like most of us) finds it difficult to live with contradictions. Lawyers are trained to understand and guard law using the vocabulary of validity, legitimacy, determinacy, objectivity and neutrality to maintain law’s internal coherence and integrity. Dominant schools in jurisprudence work to overcome contradictions rather than consider them to be productive. Such an approach is buttressed by a popular and populist demand that tends to equate law with justice despite law’s failures and complicities with structures of oppression (the criminalization of triple talaq and the decriminalization of sodomy being two recent instances).
However, through an encounter with queer theory (among other critical fields), certain strands of legal thinking and scholarship in the common law world have become hospitable to the idea of contradictions. But these strands of critical work in law occupy at best a niche and at worst a marginal space on the law curriculum. The presence of words like capitalism, patriarchy or brahminism in a conventional law course tends to relegate that course to an outsider status of ‘non-law’ and thus of lesser value. How does a critical legal scholar then teach core law courses—the ones that ostensibly have little to do with politics or morality—to foreground the generative scholarly and ethical possibilities in contradictions? How can the orientation of queer theory be brought into law without teaching queer theory in named form?