The Pluralism of Identities as a Challenge to Law’s and Legal Theory’s Claim to Comparability

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the impact that a critical-reflexive experience of marginalized identities and forms of life—opening the path to a plural ensemble of outsider jurisprudence(s) and their particular (incommensurable) ways of storytelling — may have in our understanding of law as a specific practical-cultural way of creating and institutionalizing communitarian meanings. Should this impact be reduced to a contingent prescriptive statutory assimilation of plausible answers? Should not instead this impact be reconstituted under the possibilities of Fish’s interpretative communities, or, in alternative, as an opportunity (explored in the “thematic level” of Greimassian
semiotics) to confront different “narrative typifications of action” (Jackson) and the corresponding sociolects? Doesn’t this experience of the margins impose however a more drastic reflexive challenge? I would say it does, not only as a possibility to discuss the impact of narrative rationality in law’s construction of meaning (in counterpoint with other types of rationality), but also as an opportunity to discuss law’s and legal theory’s claims to comparability, which means returning to Duncan Kennedy and to the specific gaping wounds that Feminist Jurisprudence(s), Critical Race Theory, Lesbian, Gay and Transgender Legal Studies or Postcolonial Law Theory opened in Critical Legal Studies.