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Louis Wolcher, "Being Mistaken", Law and Critique Vol.V no.2 (1994), 75-207: This article employs the method of hermeneutic phenomenology, as interpreted by Martin Heidegger in Being and Time, to display the phenomenon of mistake as it is lived. The goal is to put in question the claims of mainstream legal thought concerning the existentiality of its objects. The article does this by comparing the phenomenon of mistake as we in fact live it with the concept of mistake as it has been mythologized by Anglo-American legal doctrines governing relief from contractual obligations due to mistake. Much depends, in numerous fields of law, on the true knowledge/false knowledge dichotomy, and on the existentiality of that to which these concepts correspond. But critical phenomenology can be used to show that law's existential claims in this area are hollow. The article uses phenomenology not to enact a new "essence of mistake," but to destabilize the smugness which authorizes mainstream legal consciousness to maintain a singular view of reality, deny complexity, and encourage closure on its own terms. Author's mailing address: Professor Louis E. Wolcher, 1100 N.E. Campus Parkway, Seattle, Washington 98105-6617, U.S.A. E-mail address: wolcher@u.washington.edu

Louis Wolcher, "The Man in a Room: Remarks on Derrida's Force of Law", Law and Critique Vol. VII no.1 (1996), 35-64: What can be said about the relations that subsist between legal violence and justice? The need to ask this question is nowhere more acutely felt than in contemplating the case of Nazi Germany's genocidal "final solution of the Jewish problem": the state-sanctioned murder, during the Second World War, of more than six million Jews in what has come to be known as the Holocaust. In his article Force of Law, the French philosopher Jacques Derrida-the founder and most famous practitioner of a form of criticism called "deconstruction"- addresses the relationships between law and justice, justice and the Holocaust, and justice and deconstruction. Derrida's article essentially equates deconstruction with justice (or its possibility). This equation emerges out of a reading of Walter Benjamin's 1921 essay, Critique of Violence, as that remarkable document is viewed from the perspective of the Holocaust. The present article interrogates and criticizes Derrida's text from a standpoint that problematizes both the impulse to speak, and the impulse to be silent, in the face of what is unjust. The standpoint of the present article is revealed by a comparison of the philosophies of Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, and realizes itself in a series of numbered remarks. These remarks find the equation of justice and deconstruction to be on the very same level as the Benjaminian critique of legal violence that Derrida seeks, unsuccessfully, to distance himself from. Author's mailing address: Professor Louis E. Wolcher, 1100 N.E. Campus Parkway, Seattle, Washington 98105-6617, U.S.A. E-mail address: wolcher@u.washington.edu

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