Volume 5 (2000) Issue 1 Law & The Sacred

Law and the Sacred might appear as another one of the couplings that have characterised contemporary legal scholarship. Although it is too soon to say if this coupling represents a new departure, it can at least be distinguished by its passion; by its working through of the sense in which secular, western, law has failed to shake its constitution in the pre-modern. Scholarship in this field locates itself in a movement away from the domination of legal theory by a scientising social theory, or a positivisation of knowledge that rejects the mystery and the beyond in its own self-definition and auto-production. This collection attempts to follow a direction suggested by John Milbank: the relaxation of the pressure of the sacred has not filled the only available space with the steam of the "purely human" (1995: 2). A second characteristic of this scholarship is its critical edge: it could be said that it is provoked by a sense of dis-ease; an awareness that law's claims to order and empire ring hollow.

Adam Geary - Special Editor
This issue also edited by Joel Butler