Street-Level Sovereignty

Reviews / Votes

This intriguing volume compels the reader to consider how law and sovereignty play out perpetually in our everyday lives, our lives lived on 'the street'. . . Bringing together a diverse collection of authors writing on a wide range of topics, the chapters are unified in their showing of how ubiquitous dynamics of law and sovereignty are, and how they are typically overlooked and unseen. * International Journal for the Semiotics of Law * Law is everywhere, not just in courtrooms, police stations, or corporate firms. In this creative collection, Marusek and Brigham bring together fresh work that explores how law works in everyday spaces that have long been overlooked: in traffic, in bed, at a restaurant, an airport, a sports arena, while getting a haircut, listening to ambient noise, or even when simply laughing. The result is a transformative vision of law that foregrounds the sovereignty of the street in the twenty-first century. -- Susan Burgess, Ohio University Street-Level Sovereignty: The Intersection of Space and Law is a compelling collection. Unlike many edited works, there is a theme that clearly unifies the many wonderful essays. This theme, which highlights law's lives on the street and in the everyday world, is a familiar and important one. Marusek, Brigham, and their contributors pay homage to the best in the law and society tradition while enriching it with sophisticated explorations of the significance of place, materiality, and sovereignty. This book is an essential resource for a new generation of interdisciplinary legal scholars. -- Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College Street-Level Sovereignty is a kaleidoscopic and endlessly engaging exploration of law in ordinary life. An impressive roster of scholars examine spaces and places far beyond the courtroom, investigating how law organizes our experience with everything from airport body scanners, comedy, and playgrounds to automobile traffic, military haircuts, noisy frogs, and sex. A wonderful study of law's everyday happening. -- Keith J. Bybee, author of How Civility Works