At the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association, Boaventura de Sousa Santos delivered an invited plenary address in which he challenged sociolegal scholars to consider the current state of our field. Perhaps, he argued, the paradigms that stand behind the conventions of much current scholarship are inadequate for understanding critical aspects of the law-society relationship. He proposed three metaphors to describe paradigmatic crises and possibilities: the frontier, the baroque, and the South. Santos provoked considerable discussion in the corridors of the Royal York Hotel in Toronto, but a jam-packed meeting program did not offer an opportunity for any sort of public commentary from those who heard him.

We are entering a period of paradigmatic transition. From the paradigm of modernity we have come to a new paradigm which by now can only be defined inadequately. The inevitability of such inadequacy lends to the name of postmodernity its grain of truth. Periods of paradigmatic transition are periods of fierce competition among rival epistemologies and knowledges. They are, therefore, periods of radical thinking—both deconstructive and reconstructive thinking. When viewed from the old outgoing paradigm, they are periods of unthinking or of utopia. When viewed from the new, incoming paradigm, they are periods of temporary and fragile scaffoldings, emergent ruins sustaining nothing but themselves, witnessing nothing but the future. In periods of paradigmatic transition, all competing knowledges reveal themselves as rhetorical in nature, bundles of arguments and of premises of argumentation which circulate inside rhetorical audiences. Indeed, what distinguishes the audiences are the specific arguments and premises of argumentation that they consider valid and convincing or persuasive. In the specific paradigmatic transition we are now entering, any given discipline, be it sociology of law or archeology, tends to be constituted by a larger or smaller number of rival rhetorical audiences. The level of real communication among them is very low and whatever they do in common—books, journals, and conferences—has much more to do with the dominant institutional production of knowledge than with the knowledge produced. In the early stages of the paradigmatic transition, such as the one we are in now, the most fundamental cleavage is between the audiences that deny the very existence of the paradigmatic transition—these we may call the subparadigmatic audiences—and the audiences that assume the existence of such transition. The latter I call the paradigmatic audiences. I would imagine that in this room we have both types of audiences. My argument, being a paradigmatic one, will no doubt be unequally convincing for the different audiences present here today; as such, it will contribute to confirming the different audiences in their differences.

We make lots of things into texts these days (movies, conversation, dreams) in order to bring them into our discussions. The hope is that something is gained. Here we have a public speech that has become an essay. I hope we don't lose too much in treating it that way. In addressing the written text of Santos's “Three Metaphors …” (1995), I would like to recall the speech of which the text is a part. The speech took place in a large and fabulously ornate room in the Royal York Hotel in Toronto. It was a luncheon speech presented to gathered scholars who had, as I recall, just completed a chicken salad plate and run through a series of awards. The speech came near the end of the 1995 Annual Meeting of the Law and Society Association.

In his address to the 1995 Law and Society Association, Boaventura de Sousa Santos argued that times are changing and that “we”—the law and society audience, among others—must use “the imagination to explore new modes of human possibility and styles of will and to oppose the necessity of what exists on behalf of something radically better that is worth fighting for and to which humanity is fully entitled” (Santos 1995:573). Admirable sentiments, on which Santos elaborates via three suggestive metaphors introduced to help “reinvent maps of social emancipation and subjectivities with the capacity and desire for using them” (ibid.).

The metaphors Santos (1995) affords us for orienting a postmodern subject no doubt emerge from a substantial body of empirical research and theoretical deliberation. Having only been provided with a very brief summary of his remarks upon which to base my own, I risk an insistence upon sociohistorical contextualization that may well be more appropriately attended to in Santos's aggregated agenda. So be it. My point, in any case, is simply to suggest that rather than privilege any formulation of the subject, postmodern or otherwise, in a progressive reimagining of the law, we put the subject at risk by continuously interrogating its privileges. I might begin by disputing Santos's claim that “we” are in a period of “paradigmatic transition” by virtue of having to acknowledge other knowledges and “rival epistemologies” by asking for whom the exhaustion of modernity's certainties is a “deep and irresolvable crisis.” Similarly, one could argue that, far from being exhausted, modernity's categories continue to provide many of the conceptual resources for a truly profound expansion of democratic politics—one that is only now realizing its potential by virtue of the failure of Enlightenment universal-isms and the proliferation of identities, epistemologies, and new social movements (Botwinick 1993; Laclau 1993, 1994; Lefort 1988; McClure 1992; Mouffe 1992a, 1993, 1995). Such politics, of course, are very likely to be enacted in struggles to expand the inclusiveness of common law and legislative categories—in courts, legislatures, and administrative tribunals, at local, national, and international levels. I will briefly return to the potential politics of postmodernity in my conclusion, for it is there, perhaps, that we might find more promising resources for a new conception of law.

Even in this “adapted and simplified” package, Boa Santos (1995) makes a powerful case for a new legal theory able to survive and prosper in “the forthcoming paradigmatic competitions” (p. 574). I have not yet read the extended argument in Santos's book, but I am already persuaded that his cosmopolitan learning and encompassing synthesis has the power to inform and challenge legal scholars in all parts of the globe. His argument is admittedly utopian, and he is well aware of the possibilities that what he offers will require some remarkable societal changes—and can, in any event, be “coopted.” But that does not detract from the power of the vision. Rather than comment on the vision itself, however, I will use his analysis to focus on a slightly different research agenda and theoretical perspective. I think the approach discussed in this comment is complementary, but it requires that I begin with a disagreement about the framing of the issue.

What happens when the occupiers abandon the city but the forces of liberation fail to show up? What should we do when the rebels lose the people in a thicket of doctrine and become terrorists, but the empire can't imagine how to strike back except with more terror directed at the same people?

The authors apply recent work on regulation to anthropological analyses of community. In Ontario, Canada, the Provincial Police, community leaders, and the traveling show industry itself regulated shows, albeit to different ends and through different means. For rural Ontarians, invoking the law to combat crooked American carnivals articulated and reinforced local and national identity. Distinctions between insiders and outsiders were amplified because circus folk were quintessential others—itinerants and even “freaks.” Unlike most outsiders, however, carnies reveled in their difference and saw through the moral hypocrisy of regulation.

In this article I examine the applied relevance of trial talk for rape shield legislation and attempts to evaluate the impact of such legal reforms. Using linguistic data from the Kennedy Smith rape trial, I argue that attempts to progressively implement rape shield have thus far failed and that research evaluating its impact has been more or less misguided because reformers and researchers have consistently failed to scrutinize empirically the interactional object to which rape shield legislation is applied: the language of evidence in testimony. Looking at the social construction of rape's legal facticity, I propose new methods of interpreting and evaluating legal reforms based on an understanding of language use and the performance of knowledge in context.

I explore the work of secretaries and lawyers at one of the most innovative providers of personal legal services in the last 20 years—franchise law firms. I show how the organization of work and the nature of the legal work at two firms has led to the transformation of lawyers into salespeople for mass-produced legal services. While clients may benefit from the convenience of franchise law firms, the attorneys employed by these firms are frustrated by limitations placed on their professional judgments and skills.

A resurgent debate in the field of judicial politics has been the controversy over which has the greatest effect in decisionmaking: legal or extralegal variables. This study applies the controversy to an arena in which a consistent answer has yet to be found: federal district court reception of the U.S. Supreme Court's 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision. Anecdotal evidence has suggested that there was a great deal of variation in compliance, with southern district justices being substantially unwilling to apply the new precedent. Results found here, however, strongly suggest that the legal variable was in fact significant. Moreover, this variable was more important than region or type of case.