Foreword: Law as...III - Glossolalia: Toward a Minor (Historical) Jurisprudence

Abstract

This paper serves as foreword and introduction to the third collection of essays produced under the auspices of the biennial “Law As …” conference, held at the University of California Irvine School of Law. The third conference took place in March 2014; the essays presented there are be published in a symposium issue of the U.C. Irvine Law Review in 2015. Following on from the first (April 2010) and second (March 2012) conferences, the third further develops the distinctive trajectory of “Law As …” as a mode of legal study situated at the intersection of law, the humanities, and the social sciences. Each of the three conferences, and resulting collections of articles [see 1 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 519 (2011), and 4 U.C. Irvine L. Rev. 1 (2014), has had its own distinctive character, but on each occasion the intent has been to engage in a double move: to deploy history as an interpretive practice – a theory, a methodology, a philosophy – with which to engage law; and simultaneously to offer history as a substantive arena in which other interpretive practices from across the broad spectrum of the humanities and social sciences can undertake their own engagement with law. The result is a multi-year work in progress that has arced in the direction of locating “Law As …” in the realm of jurisprudence. As this introduction explains, that tendency is rendered explicit in the latest collection, which embraces the distinctive template of "minor jurisprudence."