{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.024704065877509007, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006176016469377252, 'mean_word_length': 5.132492113564669, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
The Human and the Idea(l) of Justice

Aristotle had it wrong. Law is not reason free from passion. The imbrication of such a fiction into jurisprudence may facilitate our efforts to sort subjects and doctrines within legal landscapes, but it is an evasion of a devastating sort. The three books taken up by this review: Rajini Srikanth’s Constructing the Enemy: Empathy/ Antipathy in US Literature and Law (2012), Colin Dayan’s The Law is a White Dog: How legal Rituals Make and Unmake Prisons (2011), and Austin Sarat’s edited collection of essays: Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture (2011) are each extended engagements with the messiness of the worlds the law creates. Passion, emotion, and affect are at work both in its operation and in the Herculean efforts to reign in the law’s brutal tendencies. To recognize suffering is a passionate affair. To witness when justice is brutally impartial ignites empathy and hopeful imaginings. Over the course of her scholarly work, Dayan has consistently explored the philosophical questions raised by coercive power, its recognition, and its failures, as well as the legitimacy of authority. The Law is a White Dog extends her earlier projects with a set of mutually informing, provocative explorations regarding how law constitutes subjects, manages what seems to be unmanageable, and unmakes existences. Most powerfully, Dayan explores how legal constructs deprive beings of personhood in the forms of banishment, punishment, imprisonment, and enslavement. The violence that attends each of these formal places and categories coexists with a sense of civil order felt by the general public. This simultaneous world destruction and world creation separates persons and nonpersons, or even partial persons. Dayan draws a genealogy from the civil death of enslavement into the forms of incomplete personhood into which those who are imprisoned and detained are currently cast. This