Adam Gearey

The Poetics of Practical Reason: Joseph Raz and Philip Larkin

Abstract This article is an exercise in poetic jurisprudence. It argues that Joseph Raz’s political and moral philosophy and Philip Larkin’s poetry can be understood as ways of becoming “less deceived” about the nature of social life. However, Larkin’s poetry also reckons the costs of practical reason. Rather than being encouraged towards moral perfectionism, the less deceived are left with the sense of life exhausting itself and the terrible fear of death. What if reason cannot provide comfort? If the old rituals of religion are no longer sufficient, how does practical reason help us to celebrate and endure? Might there be a different thinking of human solidarity in Larkin? This takes us towards a reading of the most intriguing line from the poem “An Arundel Tomb”: “what will survive of us is love.”

“You May Find Yourselves Changed in Unexpected Ways:” literature and poverty law

Abstract This paper outlines a tradition of Anglo-American literature that stretches from Jane Addams to Jack London and George Orwell. Locating poverty law scholarship in this tradition of poverty writing has important implications for how we understand lawyering for the poor. Borrowing the idea of unlearning from Addams, this paper argues that reading literature is central to the moral task of self-definition. It may be that poverty lawyering is best understood as a peculiar continuation of a tradition of unlearning that defines the problematic of poverty writing. Orwells work is central to understanding unlearning. In order to develop these arguments, the latter part of this paper focuses on the work of Lucie E. White. Whilst Whites concepts of honesty, self-criticism, and poverty lawyering as “piece work” carry forward elements of unlearning, her engagement with poverty is not pushed far enough. Questions remain about the extent to which understandings of poverty law allow the work on the self to engage with the abjection of being down and out and the politics of socialism that it throws up.

Equity in a Severe Style: The Phenomenology of Spirit, Conscience and Critical Legal Thinking

Abstract The outline of a critical approach to equity can be found in Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit. For Hegel, equity is essential to the articulation of the moral subjectivity of market actors. Equity as ‘moral conscience’ must be located within the concept of objective spirit as an authentic way of grasping the complexity of a normative order and its location in a broader socio-economic context. However, following Gillian Rose, the claim to ethical order made by bourgeois market society is profoundly problematic. Roses argument points towards a study of the relationship of equity and ‘the market’ as the misrecognition of ethical community; an insight that suggests a more extended critical Marxist approach to equity might be possible.

Welfare, community and solidarity

Radical constitutional scholarship could make use of a concept of solidarity to enable a new engagement with concepts of welfare and political community. Rather than a welfare state, with all its attendant problems, it is possible to link the concept of solidarity to the notion of a welfare community. A welfare community asserts the importance of common life against capitalist market relationships. Conceiving of the welfare community requires insights from continental philosophy, as well as developments of co-production and core economy thinking. Most importantly, this approach grounds welfare in a political critique of free market capitalism, rather than a theory of rights, and requires a bold assertion of a constitution as a limitation of the socially and economically destructive effects of markets.

With the One Coin for Fee: A.E. Houseman's Law

Any abstract would ruin the poetic economy ofthis text.

We Fearless Ones: Nietzsche and Critical Legal Studies

Abstraction destroys life.