Law and Resistance

Legal orders do not emerge from a prior social contract or abstract norms. They crystallize out of acts of resistance – revolutions, protests and transgressions – that break with an existing juridical order and force the articulation of a new one. Resistance is therefore not external to law but constitutive of it. Yet once instituted, law must disavow this beginning to sustain its fiction of autonomy, neutrality, and universality. This disavowal, however, is never complete, as law relies on resistance to delineate its boundaries and secure its porous frontiers. At the same time, resistance depends on law as its field of intelligibility: it requires law’s stage, grammar, and normative framework to articulate its claim. Law and resistance are thus mutually constitutive and structurally interdependent, bound together in a dynamic that is inherently unstable and antagonistic. This book explores this constitutive paradox that defines the relationship between law and resistance.

Against theories that treat law as a closed normative system or as a mere instrument of domination, the book develops a performative account of law in which this paradox emerges as constitutive of the conditions under which resistance becomes possible. Focusing on the political trial – a contested space in which law cannot obscure the rupture and contingency from which it emerges but must instead engage the forces it seeks to domesticate – the book shows how law, neither fully autonomous nor wholly determined by power, can become a site of struggle in which authority is performed and contested.

Law and Resistance considers the different ways in which a politics of resistance is enabled in the courtroom, as it uncovers a performative logic that contingently conditions, and thus breaks open, law’s otherwise closed normativity.