Material Law

A Jurisprudence of What's Real

By: John Brigham

Narrated by: Alan Taylor

In Material Law, distinguished scholar John Brigham focuses on the places where law and material life intersect, and how law creates and alters our social reality. Brigham looks at an eclectic group of bodies and things - from maps and territories and trends in courthouse architecture to a woman's womb and a judge's body - to make connections between the material and the legal. Theoretically sophisticated, and consistently fascinating, Material Law integrates law and society, political science, and popular culture in a truly interdisciplinary fashion. Brigham examines how the meaning of law is influenced by politics, reviewing, for example, whether the authority of global law supersedes that of national law in the context of Anglo-American cultural colonialism. What emerges is a well-reasoned look at how the authority of law constitutes what we see as real in our lives.

©2009 Temple University (P)2015 Redwood Audiobooks

Critic reviews

"Fascinating.... Material Law is a profound addition to constitutive scholarship." ( International Journal for the Semiotics of Law)

"John Brigham is one of our era's most imaginative and innovative sociolegal scholars. This book is a master work which will quickly become a classic of modern legal scholarship." (Austin Sarat, Amherst College)

"Material Law is an important theoretical and empirical contribution to legal studies." (Mark Tushnet, Harvard Law School)