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Margaret Davies, "The Proper: Discourses of Purity", Law and Critique IX/2 (1998), 147-173: As Derrida has indicated, Western Philosophy is a 'metaphysics of the proper'. The 'proper' can be described as a configuration of conceptually-related characteristics, such as self-possession, presence, purity, singularity, and propriety, many of these terms surfacing at critical points in Derrida's work. This article elaborates on the notion of the proper with particular reference to law, legal positivism, and the legal concepts of property and personality. In addition to the work of Derrida, a variety of sources are drawn upon, including several literary works (by Suniti Namjoshi and Kate Grenville), to illustrate the ways in which the proper structures thinking around the person, law and ownership. In doing so, the article draws connections between the different dimensions of the proper, and concludes by considering some of the implications of Derrida's deconstruction of the proper for legal thinking, especially in relation to property. e-mail: margaret.davies@flinders.edu.au

George C. Pavlich, "Political Logic, Colonial Law and the 'Land of the Long White Cloud'", Law and Critique IX/2 (1998), 175-206: Colonial discourses produce particular political rationales to justify, and to direct, proposed expansions over other lands. This paper focuses on a political rationality enunciated in a discourse seeking to deploy a British colonial legal system over Aotearoa/New Zealand. It focuses on the colonial discourse's development towards the end of the 1830s, and charts several founding precepts. The discussion indicates how, by defining "New Zealand" society as intrinsically anarchic, this colonial discourse comes to declare colonial state law as necessary for the "orderly progress" towards a "civilised" society. Such foundations are challenged from the apparatuses of a different archive, an "outpost", where the erstwhile discourse is confronted through the horizons of more recent one. Here, the paper shows how traces of modern political discourses (including cameralist notions) continue to haunt, in quite fundamental ways, specific political features of contemporary political logics and orders. Possible ways of transcending the auspices of the erstwhile colonial discourse are entertained as a prelude to contemplating political rationales in postcolonial contexts. e-mail: g.pavlich@auckland.ac.nz

Leslie J. Moran and Derek McGhee, "Perverting London: The Cartographic Practices of Law", Law and Critique IX/2 (1998), 207-224: This paper undertakes a reading of a report submitted by the then Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police to the Wolfenden Committee which was undertaking a review of the law and practice applicable to homosexual offences. The report contains a map of central London showing the distribution of encounters between the police and men who have sex with other men. The map provides an opportunity to examine the relation between law and space. Here law and legal practice are examined as practices of cartography. Using the work of Michel Foucault, de Certeau, historical material and material contemporary with the Wolfenden committee's review, the paper examines the institution of the police as an institution of space. Using recent writings in the fields of cultural and sexual geography, the paper examines the nature of space generated through the panoptic practice of policing. Using Bakhtin's theory of the carnivalesque, through an examination of plain clothes police operations in public toilets, the authors analyse the transformation of legal practices of policing in liminal space. e-mail: l.moran@law.bbk.ac.uk

Jari Kauppinen, "Law Without Place: Topology and Decision. Questions of Line and Literature", Law and Critique IX/2 (1998), 225-248: The article deals with the question of decidability and undecidability (of law or text in Jacques Derrida's Force of Law) in a topological context. The topology is here thought more as a futural event's taking place; instead of temporality, time of decision, the ethical (ethos means a place, dwelling) is connected to a topos or utopos. There is the atopical level (of law) that keeps the decision open although in (the procedural level, for example) one must always make decisions. Therefore law's place is atopological, it is without a place - we could neither decide the law nor know its place.

The question of decision, line and place is read through different texts by Derrida, Carl Schmitt and Paul Celan. Finally, the democracy to come in Derrida's recent theory is connected to Maurice Blanchot's notion of literary space (The Space of Literature). Also the Politics of Friendship (Derrida) is discussed in relation to the question of friend, enemy and the becoming of a community.

The decision here means also a meridian (in Schmitt, Nomos der Erde and Celan, Der Meridian) that decides the law and the line (Heidegger, The Question of Being) in a metaphysical topology. The decision must be without a ground; it is the impossibility of a decision that means re-searching for a place, a line that decides between tropo-topological and the turning between poles. If the place of undecidability is atopological it refers to the place of becoming, like the becoming of literature (Blanchot) and of democracy (Derrida, Specters of Marx).

In Force of Law the law is undecidable and that is also in relation to law's force - the force is thought in relation to the truth (aletheia) and force as physis and therefore the "force" behind the law could be physis as aletheia as Heidegger proposes.

Jiri Priban, "Doing What Comes Naturally, Or A Walk on the Wild Side?: Remarks on Stanley Fish's Anti-Foundationalist Concept of Law, its Closure and Force", Law and Critique IX/2 (1998), 249-270: 'The article deals with current schools of legal philosophy and theory which are significantly influenced by the post-structural turn in the concept of law. This turn is illustrated by the works of the American literary and legal scholar, Stanley Fish. The text is centred around a difference and arguments between the anti-foundationalist, pragmatic concept of law as worked out by Stanley Fish, and the theoretical-ideological adoption of post-structuralism by some of the most representative members of the Critical Legal Studies Movement. The first part consists of a comparison between the anti-theoretical approach of Stanley Fish and ideological critical and politicising attitudes of the Critical Legal Studies Movement. However, Fish's concept of law goes beyond the limited borders of legal theory and, paradoxically, shows some common features with the general social systems theory of the German sociologist, Niklas Luhmann. The second part of the text therefore analyses relations between Luhmann's concept of autopoiesis and Fish's understanding of law as a closed context of interpretive practices. The third part of the text then concentrates on a mutual inspiration between Stanley Fish and Jacques Derrida in the field of definition of 'the force of law'. In spite of acceptance of many standpoints of Stanley Fish, the author of this article concludes by a critique of law's closure as defined by Stanley Fish and by a rejection of the restrictive function of force in the legal context which dismantles law's heterogeneity and the art of human memory.

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