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Excerpt of the day: Gravity. It isn't just a good idea. It's the law.

I am pondering posting a "Concept of the Day: Structure vs. Agency", but I am not sure that I understand it myself. I should stick with employment discrimination law. However, going over that concept would allow me to introduce another topic of blogging delight, or "great beefs in the annals of academia"--apparently, the structure/agency camps are very polarized and contentious.

But anyway:

From Ewick, Patricia and Silbey, Susan: The Common Place of Law (130-131):

The picture on the front of this postcard is a drawing of an apple about to fall on top of a man's head. The trajectory of the apple is indicated with a series of meticulously drawn and convincing angles. The caption at the bottom of the picture reads: "Gravity. It isn't just a good idea. It's the law."

Where Kafka's parable [ed: The Trial] serves as a description of a dehumanized legality or reified law, this postcard depicts legality as a socially constructed phenomenon. The postcard's joke turns on the recognition and simultaneous rejection of the law's claim to be like gravity, a natural, inevitable, and determinant phenomenon. The postcard mocks, as it displays, the pretensions of law. Typically, the reminder "It's the law" is tacked on to the end of some injunction (for example, "to buckle up," "don't smoke," "register for the draft") and is meant to preempt argument or resistance in circumstances where noncompliance is likely. Thus, by reminding us that gravity is not just a good idea but that "it's the law," the postcard juxtaposes the human to the natural, the variable to the eternal, the particularity of public policies to the universality of the physical world. By playfully invoking the law of gravity, the postcard challenges the gravity of law.

This card was purchased in a national bookstore chain in a typical suburban mall. As a piece of popular culture--mass produced and familiar--the postcard reminds us that if we are to understand legal culture and consciousness we must track these commonplace readings and, as important, their constitutive relationship to the law.

Yep, no one kills a joke like an academic. We invented deconstructionism and the sport of beating dead horses.

Full post as published by Law and Letters on April 21, 2008 (boomark / email).