How Strange the Change from Major to Minor

Authors

Peter Goodrich, Yeshiva University, New York

Abstract

The lines from a Noel Coward song provide the appropriately melancholic and suitably ambiguous title to an excavation of the ontology of the minor. Associated theologically with the abrogation of all law, the minor is the child, play, the modal chord that challenges, subverts and displaces the certainty of the major key and black letter law. A minor jurisprudence is argued here to be a lifestyle that challenges the extant legal form of office, the establishment as doctrine, the stasis and complacency of the institution.

Recommended Citation

Goodrich, Peter, How Strange the Change from Major to Minor, Law Text Culture, 21, 2017, 30-53.
Available at:https://ro.uow.edu.au/ltc/vol21/iss1/3