The Secrets of Law

Austin Sarat, Lawence Douglas, Martha Merrill Umphrey

• Publisher: Stanford Law Books
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780804782593
• eBook ISBN: 9780804783903
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Jurisprudence
• Index: Law

The Secrets of Law explores the ways law both traffics in and regulates secrecy. Taking a close look at the opacity built into legal and governance processes, it explores the ways law produces zones of secrecy, the relation between secrecy and justice, and how we understand the inscrutability of law's processes.

The first half of the work examines the role of secrecy in contemporary political and legal practices—including the question of transparency in democratic processes during the Bush Administration, the principle of public justice in England's response to the war on terror, and the evidentiary law of spousal privilege. The second half of the book explores legal, literary, and filmic representations of secrets in law, focusing on how knowledge about particular cases and crimes is often rendered opaque to those attempting to access and decode the information. Those invested in transparency must ultimately cultivate a capacity to read between the lines, decode the illegible, and acknowledge both the virtues and dangers of the unknowable.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Series Page
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Contents
• Contributors
• Transparency and Opacity in the Law: An Introduction
• Open Secrets and Dirty Hands
• Secret Trials and Public Justice
• Spousal Secrets: Same-Sex Couples and the Functional Approach to Spousal Evidentiary Privileges
• Wilkie Collins’s Law Books: Law, Literature, and Factual Precedent
• Historiographic Secrets of the Labour Contract—The Law and Literature of Lewis Jones ‘Cwmardy’ and ‘We Live’
• Duly Noted or Off the Record? Sovereignty and the Secrecy of the Law in Cinema
• Index
• The Amherst Series