About Libraries: A Jurisographer’s Notes on Lives Lived With Law (in London and Sydney)

Authors

Ann Genovese, University of Melbourne

Abstract

This essay, like much of my recent writing, is concerned with explaining how I go about my work, by reflecting on what I have inherited from others, how I have conducted my own practices over time as feminist, jurisprudent, and historian, and how those personae join together. The central thread of this self-consciously explanatory writing, and the histories of jurisprudence and feminism that accompanies it, is to make plain that the personae I inhabit when I write, as much as what I write about and how, have a literal genealogy, are a matter of inheritance, as much as reimagination. The purpose of addressing this as a central concern in my work is neither to offer ‘personal experience’, as a confessional or Romantic gloss, nor as a political device. It is to train myself in the activity of writing within the conduct of life tradition; and to imagine forms of writing adequate to the engagements I believe are a necessary part of my own life as a scholar in contemporary Australia (Genovese 2013; Genovese 2014).

Recommended Citation

Genovese, Ann, About Libraries: A Jurisographer’s Notes on Lives Lived With Law (in London and Sydney), Law Text Culture, 20, 2016, 33-65.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol20/iss1/4