• This Month’s Issue: Judicial Review II
• Classic Justice
• Rape Reconsidered
• Forthcoming

We bring you the second and final installment of Jurists on JURIST for 2001. Starting in 1998, we began inviting judges – federal and state / appellate and trial – to author original reviews for Books-on-Law. Our inaugural issue offered reviews by eight federal or state judges. In our January 1999 issue, five other judges – foreign or federal, trial or appellate – reviewed a variety of law-related books. In this issue, as in the last issue, we offer yet more reviews by members of the bench. Consistent with our eclectic approach to things, we have organized this issue and the last according to geography – all of the reviewers are sitting judges (federal or state) in Washington State. In future issues we hope to do likewise with other states. We also plan to host an entire issue of reviews by women jurists. So stay with us . . . more Jurists on JURIST are yet to come.

Judge Barbara Jacobs Rothstein (U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington) opens this month's special issue of "Washington Jurists on JURIST – Part II" with her review of a work on Justice Louis Brandeis and the famous Erie R.R. v. Tompkins case. Judge Robert S. Lasnik (U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington) follows with his reflections on a study of the First Amendment from 1787 to 1868. Then, Justice Richard B. Sanders (Washington Supreme Court) gives his take on a treatment of the Rehnquist Court's Constitution. An analysis of a book on the rule of law in societies dealing with their evil pasts is given by Chief Judge Mary Kay Becker (Washington State Court of Appeals, Division I). Next, Chief Judge Karen G. Seinfeld (Washington State Court of Appeals, Division II) considers an account of biblical narratives and their applicability to law. Winding down the final issue of "Washington Jurists on JURIST," Judge Susan R. Agid (Washington State Court of Appeals, Division I) praises an historical work on the feats and foibles of America's special prosecutors.

Disagree with judicial review? Talk back to the judges. We invite your input . . . no fear of any contempt citations here.

Looking for a new law-related book? Check the selection listed in our Book Notices.

Nearly two decades ago, James Boyd White drew on the writings of Homer, Thucydides, Socrates, and Plato in an attempt to enrich legal theory with insights from literary theory. (See When Words Lose Their Meaning (University of Chicago Press, 1984).) Somewhat in that same tradition come two new books: Law's Interior: Legal and Literary Constructions of the Self (Cornell University Press, April 2001) (ISBN: 080143856X) by Kevin M. Crotty, and Antigone's Claim: Kinship Between Life & Death (Columbia University Press, 2000) (ISBN: 0231118945) by Judith Butler.

Kevin M. Crotty, who is an Associate Professor of Classics at Washington and Lee University, examines Aeschylus' Oresteia, St. Augustine's Confessions, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens to offer a new model of the relationship between citizens and their laws – a model that emphasizes the power of law to shape citizens and to foster or discourage their autonomy. Professor Crotty contends that citizens are "inside" the law; they are the law's interior. Literature, he argues, is relevant to law in that it emphasizes the connections between law and the world around it – a view that corrects the tendency of legal theory to treat law as a separate, autonomous entity. In this respect, Crotty challenges the rationalist optimism that he regards as distorting much recent theorizing about law. Further, he asserts that the inability of courts to state clearly the principles informing their decisions demonstrates the stranglehold the positivist model has on us and on our legal imaginations.

In all of this, Professor Crotty sketches a model of the relation between citizens and laws that supplements the more familiar idea of law as something deliberated and enacted by rational, inherently autonomous citizens. The most important legal decisions of the past fifty years, he maintains, rest on the perception that the state, far from merely respecting the "innate" autonomy of its citizens, actively shapes that autonomy.

In Antigone's Claim, Judith Butler, a Professor of Rhetoric and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Berkeley, asks: "Could Antigone offer a model for a feminism (and more generally a radical politics) which resists and redefines the state, rather than seeks to enlist the state for its complaints?" Most interpretations of Antigone's dilemma conscript her, in the end, for the state she opposes, even if only as a sign of that state's limits. In Antigone's Claim, Butler explores Antigone's intricate family relations as an "interrogation of kinship" and sexuality that, in turn, "interrogate the state."

Professor Butler redefines Antigone's legacy. She does this by setting out to recover Antigone's revolutionary significance and liberating it for a progressive feminism and sexual politics. In the process, Butler's new interpretation reconceptualizes the incest taboo in relation to kinship – and thus opens up the concept of kinship to cultural change.

Antigone, the legendary insurgent from Sophocles's Oedipus, has long been a feminist icon of defiance. What is unclear, however, is whether she escapes from the forms of power that she opposes. Antigone, we are told, proves to be a more ambivalent figure for feminism than has been recognized, since the form of defiance she exemplifies also leads to her death. On that score, Butler argues that Antigone represents a form of feminist and sexual agency that is fraught with risk. Moreover, Antigone shows how the constraints of normative kinship unfairly decide what will and will not be a livable life.

Professor Butler further explores the meaning of Antigone, wondering what forms of kinship might have allowed her to live. Along the way, she considers the works of such philosophers as Hegel, Lacan, and Irigaray. Antigone's Claim relates Antigone's courageous deeds to the claims made by those whose relations are still not honored as those of proper kinship, showing how a culture of normative heterosexuality obstructs our capacity to see what sexual freedom and political agency could be.

By most measures, the central work in our times on rape has been Susan Brownmiller's Against Our Will (Simon & Schuster, 1975). More recently, there has been the controversial A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion (MIT Press, 2000) by Randy Thornhill, Craig T. Palmer, Margo Wilson (reviewed for Books-on-Law by Lynn Hecht Schafran, with a reply by by Randy Thornhill & Craig T. Palmer). Now comes Rethinking Rape (Cornell University Press, April 2001) (ISBN: 0801437946) by Ann J. Cahill, an Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Elon College.

Rape, contends Professor Cahill, affects not only those women who are raped, but also all women who experience their bodies as "rapable" and adjust their lives accordingly. Rethinking Rape counters legal and feminist definitions of rape as mere assault; it decisively emphasizes the centrality of the body and sexuality in a crime, and it does so against the backdrop of the continuing oppression of women.

Rethinking Rape applies current feminist theory to urgent political and ethical issues. Ann Cahill examines the subject of rape through the work of such recent feminist thinkers as Luce Irigaray, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosi Braidotti, and Judith Butler, all of whom, she argues, understand the body as fluid and indeterminate, a site for the negotiation of power and resistance. Cahill interprets rape as an embodied, sexually marked experience; a violation of feminine bodily integrity; and a pervasive threat to the integrity and identity of any woman's person.

The wrongness of rape, contends Professor Cahill, cannot be defined as theft, battery, or the logical extension of heterosexual sex. It is not limited to a specific event, but encompasses the myriad ways in which rape threatens womanhood. As an explication that fully countenances women's experiences of their own bodies, Rethinking Rape attempts to point the way toward reparation and resistance.

The March issue of Books-on-Law, featuring works on Women & Law, is scheduled to contain the following:

• Special Coverage of Peggy Orenstein's FLUX: Women on Sex, Work, Love, Kids and Life in a Half-Changed World (Doubleday, 2000), including an interview with Peggy Orenstein by Books-on-Law Contributing Editor Mary-Christine Sungaila and four separate review essays of the book by Christine Corcos, Eileen Decker, Ruth Kahn, and Amy Longo.
• Susan Berke Fogel & Khanum Shaikh, reviewing Bonnie S. Anderson, Joyous Greetings: The First International Women's Movement (Oxford University Press, 2000).
• Richard T. Ford, reviewing Adrien Katherine Wing, editor, Global Critical Race Feminism: An International Reader (New York University Press, 2000).
• Julie Goldscheid & Mary Davis, reviewing Elizabeth Schneider, Battered Women and Feminist Lawmaking (Yale University Press, 2000).
• Irene Stewart, reviewing Brenda Feigen, Not One of the Boys: Living Life as a Feminist (Knopf, 2000).
• Kathy Zonana, reviewing Barbara Mikulski, editor, Nine & Counting: The Women of the Senate (William Morrow & Co., 2000).
• Past-Perfect reviews of Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War Against American Women (Crown, 1991) and Cynthia Fuchs Epstein, Women in Law (Anchor Press/Doubleday, 1983).

Ronald K.L. Collins & David M. Skover, Editors, Books-on-Law
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JURIST: Books-on-Law™ is edited by Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover of the Seattle University School of Law.

Board of Editorial Consultants: Raj Bhala, George Washington University Law School; Miriam Galston, George Washington University Law School; Kermit Hall, Utah State University; Yale Kamisar, University of Michigan Law School; Lisa G. Lerman, Catholic University of America School of Law; Christine Littleton, University of California at Los Angeles Law School; David M. O’Brien, University of Virginia Department of Government and Foreign Affairs; Judith Resnik, Yale Law School; Edwin L. Rubin, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Steven H. Shriffrin, Cornell Law School; Nadine Strossen, New York Law School; David B. Wilkins, Harvard Law School.

Administrative Assistant for Books-on-Law: Ms. Nancy Ammons
Technical Assistant for Books-on-Law: Steven Pacillio, Esq.

© Ronald K.L. Collins and David Skover, 2001.