A fascinating account of how the law determines or dismantles identity
and personhood
Abused dogs, prisoners tortured in Guantánamo and supermax facilities,
or slaves killed by the state-all are deprived of personhood through
legal acts. Such deprivations have recurred throughout history, and the
law sustains these terrors and banishments even as it upholds the civil
order. Examining such troubling cases, The Law Is a White Dog tackles
key societal questions: How does the law construct our identities? How
do its rules and sanctions make or unmake persons? And how do the
supposedly rational claims of the law define marginal entities, both
natural and supernatural, including ghosts, dogs, slaves, terrorist
suspects, and felons? Reading the language, allusions, and symbols of
legal discourse, and bridging distinctions between the human and
nonhuman, Colin Dayan looks at how the law disfigures individuals and
animals, and how slavery, punishment, and torture create unforeseen
effects in our daily lives.
Moving seamlessly across genres and disciplines, Dayan considers legal
practices and spiritual beliefs from medieval England, the North
American colonies, and the Caribbean that have survived in our legal
discourse, and she explores the civil deaths of felons and slaves
through lawful repression. Tracing the legacy of slavery in the United
States in the structures of the contemporary American prison system and
in the administrative detention of ghostly supermax facilities, she also
demonstrates how contemporary jurisprudence regarding cruel and unusual
punishment prepared the way for abuses in Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.
Using conventional historical and legal sources to answer unconventional
questions, The Law Is a White Dog illuminates stark truths about civil
society's ability to marginalize, exclude, and dehumanize.
