critical legal studies

post modernism

skeptical - why is something the way it is. critiquing universal truths (rejects gods), Foucault brings post modernism to legal thought.

he says that we have created a society that is ordered in certain ways but that is a choice, it is not required. we tend to view our own processes as the most natural/the best but that is only through familiarity. The goal is to denaturalize and question things that are normal around us

Foucault

his perspective borrows heavily on Nietzche's work. Nietzsche loved irony and things that can have multiple different meanings if you have the contents.

Foucault expands on this to subject everything to exploration and calls it 'non essentialism'.

he is much more focused on critiquing, and focused on becoming rather than being. Foucault is a conflict theorist but not attached to marx

non essentialism

to start from the bottom to question everything, the purpose, the legitimacy, the acceptability. and rejects the fundamental flaws of essentialism (to trace everything back to its origin).

foucault says to understand that not everything is linear and more of complex reading of philosophy.

where to first start - power by Foucault

to start off look at who has and uses power and use it as a process of examination.

Power is an analytic, and power is inherently a local and relational dynamic. we need to view power not as a brute force but instead as a pervasive, and productive force (you cannot escape power imbalances/relations).

Power shapes knowledges productions/decimated, and is embedded within knowledge.

disciplinary power

the power that law has to evoke punishment.

for criminal law, power operates thru a pervasive force and through disciplinary techniques. He claims this is a rise of "political technologies" which creates these disciplines.

In modern capitalist societies, we have these techniques, which can include penitentiary, but can surveillance too and it is this that reproduces the modern society.

this power of surveillance creates prison and those universal truths. when these become norm, there is less top down power needed because there is already social regulation.

Nemiers case 1800

mary is married to barth but is cheating on him with george. so they plan to murder barth. Anyways, the two were executed because this was expected and routine and normalized and was seen as the operation of legitimate power to regulate moral conduct.

no one questions if hanging was the only legitimate outcome for this behaviour. only 34 years later, the first women's prison was made, and the idea of reform instead of absolute execution/ power and changed it to a corrective power. through the modern system of corrections, where Foucault gives panopicton

panoption

considered the way of utilizing power efficiently using disciplinary techniques using surveillance. we become complicit in replication of surveillant power thru self surveillance.

It is most effective when you cannot see it. and through this manages conformity by limiting expression.

Foucault brings this concept and applies it to everyday world like jails, police,