A Political Economy of Contemporary Legality

Kennedy, Duncan

A Political Economy of Contemporary Legality

To appear in Poul Fritz Kjaer, ed., The Law of Political Economy: Transformations of the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2019)

50 Pages Posted: 5 Mar 2019

See all articles by Duncan Kennedy

Duncan Kennedy

Harvard Law School

Date Written: February 06, 2019

Abstract

The chapter starts with an observation: contemporary elite jurists pursue, vis-à-vis one another, a ‘hermeneutic of suspicion’, meaning that they work to uncover hidden ideological motives behind the ‘wrong’ legal arguments of their opponents, while affirming their own right answers allegedly innocent of ideology. The rise of the hermeneutic of suspicion is a striking manifestations of the contemporary transformation of the relationship between legal elites and political/economic elites. This transformation accompanies and corresponds to the progressive juridification, judicialization and finally constitionalization of the contemporary social order.

Suggested Citation: Suggested Citation

Kennedy, Duncan, A Political Economy of Contemporary Legality (February 06, 2019). To appear in Poul Fritz Kjaer, ed., The Law of Political Economy: Transformations of the Function of Law (Cambridge University Press, 2019), Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=3334107