Law by Night

In Law by Night Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks what we can learn about modern law and its authority by understanding how it operates in the dark of night. He outlines how the social experience and cultural meanings of night promote racialized and gender violence, but also make possible freedom of movement for marginalized groups that might be otherwise unavailable during the day. Examining nighttime racial violence, curfews, gun ownership, the right to sleep, and ＂take back the night＂ rallies, Goldberg-Hiller demonstrates that liberal legal doctrine lacks a theory of the night that accounts for a nocturnal politics that has historically allowed violence to persist. By locating the law’s nocturnal limits, Goldberg-Hiller enriches understandings of how the law reinforces hierarchies of race and gender and foregrounds the night’s potential to enliven a more egalitarian social life.

Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller is Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawai’i at Mānoa, coeditor of Plastic Materialities: Politics, Legality, and Metamorphosis in the Work of Catherine Malabou, also published by Duke University Press, and author of The Limits to Union: Same-Sex Marriage and the Politics of Civil Rights.