Law and Resistance: Toward a Performative Epistemology of Law

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...