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Lex Populi

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In this unorthodox but highly informative work, MacNeil examines the leading issues of legal philosophy in the unlikeliest of sources: popular culture. Searching for the hidden philosophical meani...
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  • 30 November 2009
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This is a book about jurisprudence—or legal philosophy. The legal philosophical texts under consideration are—to say the least—unorthodox. Tolkien, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Harry Potter, Legally Blonde, and others are referenced as instances of what the author calls lex populi—"pop law". Here, however, issues of legal philosophy are heavily coded, for few of these pop cultural texts announce themselves as expressly legal. Lex Populi reads these texts "jurisprudentially", with an eye to their hidden legal philosophical meanings, enabling connections such as: Tolkien's Ring as Kelsen's grundnorm; vampire slaying as legal language's semiosis; and Hogwarts as substantively unjust. Lex Populi attempts not only a jurisprudential reading of popular culture, but also a popular rereading of jurisprudence, removing it from the legal experts in order to restore it to the public at large: a lex populi by and for the people.

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Price: $28.00
Pages: 260
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Imprint: Stanford University Press
Publication Date: 30 November 2009
Trim Size: 9.00 X 6.00 in
ISBN: 9780804771719
Format: Paperback
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"With unmatched eloquence, with veritable clusters of mots justes, and with an unerring ear for the symptoms of legal anxiety in popular texts, MacNeil walks the reader through his intricate and intensely intelligent interpretations of a blazing diversity of texts, tragic, comic, epic, satirical, sci-fi and more."
William P. MacNeil is Associate Professor of Law at Griffith University.