Law, Jurisp & Social Thought 266 - Laws of Violence

States kill. Law enforcement officers may kill to protect innocent victims. The military kills to protect the nation. And a handful of states still impose the death penalty. These are all lawful killings. Since the rise of modern statehood, sovereignty depends on the ability of a state to hold monopoly over the legitimate use of violence and thus enforce its order. Without law, bare violence is incapable of establishing order. In the absence of order there is no sovereign. Without violence, law has no enforcement power. In the absence of a coercive obligation, there might be custom, morality, but not law. States enforce law through physical coercion, in extreme cases, killing.

This seminar introduces the basic elements of conventional theories of law and state, and explores the centrality that legalized violence plays in both the constitution of law and the state. The goal of the seminar is to identify and examine the constitutive though unstable relation between law and violence.

This course will examine some of the theoretical debates about law and violence and a number of examples involving law’s construction of lawful killings. We will study two examples from the domestic legal order: capital punishment and law enforcement killing. We will also study the transnational use of armed force, that is, killings by military combatants in war, and killings in the "war against terror." Specifically, each theoretical debate that we will explore will be followed by an example in which states kill in accordance to law: The Sovereign/Capital Punishment; The Force of the Law/Police Killing and the Law; Violence as Sovereign Exception/Civil Wars and International Humanitarian Law; Critique of Violence, a Critique of Justice/The Privilege to Kill in Combat; The Plasticity of International Law and the Legality of War/The War on Terror and The New Drone Wars. The goal is to think critically about the possibility of law’s ability to limit violence.

Limited to 30 students.  Spring semester. Visiting Professor Becker-Lorca.