AP/SOSC 4353 6.00
Honours Seminar: Narratives Of Legal Responsibility
This course examines the stories that the law and legal subjects tell with respect to legal responsibility. The conceptual tools developed at the beginning of the course on narrative and story-telling are used later to analyze how and where responsibility lies and falls both within law and the legal subject. We will be concerned with the effects of narrative and the cultural meaning of particular representations of responsibility. Specifically, the course will explore three primary ideas about narratives of legal responsibility: (1) narratives of legal responsibility are both popular and specialized; (2) ideological notions of the legal subject permeate the production and performance of law and legal responsibility, as we see, for example, in the finding of legal responsibility in the accused rapist and the gaybasher; and (3) although the good workings of law are premised upon the rational subject, narratives of legal responsibility acknowledge and account for the irrationality, the failings, the passions, and the complexities of the legal subject.