nucleation

LIT-1601: Violence and the Word

1 min read

Properties4
StatusActive — read 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1384) in full, from Yale Law School's repository (openYLS, Yale Law Journal collection); worth reading as the account of legal interpretation as an act whose meaning is bound to deeds others carry out in roles: a judge's word becomes violence only through enforcers who heed it, so interpretation attends to 'the conditions of effective domination', and when the role structure fails the judge's words change meaning, as in Judge Stern's Tiede sentence. Read it knowing that it argues from criminal sentencing and the death penalty, in US institutions, that its psychology is Milgram's, and that it does not treat enforcers faced with rival authorities.
Version2
Tagssociety-and-governance, philosophy-of-language
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1384 — Cover — Violence and the word

Graph View

Cover, R. M. (1986). Violence and the word. The Yale Law Journal, 95(8), 1601. doi:10.2307/796468.

Read in full on 2026-10-29 (NOTE-1384), from Yale Law School’s repository.

Why this is here

A8 called it “the single most relevant reading to emerge from the USIP police episode” (CASE-176): a claim of authority becomes effective only through an apparatus that acts on it, and the roles that interpret and the roles that enforce are different. It is the coercive half the record’s accounts of legibility and uptake (TERM-064, CLAIM-403) leave out, and bears on CLAIM-462.

Backlinks