Article on Joseph S. Jenkins’ Inheritance Law

Matthew Nicholson (Southampton Law School) recently published an article entitled, Fragmented Method: Walter Benjamin, Law, and Representation in Joseph S. Jenkins’ Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton, 26 Law & Lit. 389-398 (2014).  Provided below is a portion of the article’s introduction:

Scholarship on Walter Benjamin and law—on the significance of Benjamin’s thinking for the ontology of law, legal method, and the nature of legal scholarship—is a growth industry, a crowded marketplace.  The challenge for this industry is to create a “dialectical image,” a “flash” of light, capable of transforming legal thought, breaking the link between law, inequality, and injustice by moving law into a closer relationship with their dialectical opposites.  Whatever the debates about the phases in Benjamin’s thought—the “early,” the “late,” the Marxist, the religious—any attempt to constellate the fragments of Benjamin’s though to say something about law as an intellectual field must be judged by its compatibility with his pursuit of radical transformation in the structure and method of thought and practice itself.