About the Author

Sonja Schillings

E-Mail: Sonja.Schillings@gcsc.uni-giessen.de

Website: https://www.uni-giessen.de/fbz/gcsc/e-portfolios/gcsc/sonja-schillings

Sonja Schillings is a researcher in American Studies at the International Graduate Centre at the Study of Culture (JLU Giessen). Her work focuses on law and literature as well as literature and philosophy. She currently works on human dignity and U.S. American literature after the Second World War. Her first book, Enemies of all Humankind: Fictions of Legitimate Violence (2017) was published with the University Press of New England. She has published on American popular literature, race and space, piracy, and interdisciplinary research methods.

Contributions by Author: Sonja Schillings

On Un-Doing Law

Why should we un-do law? Sociological and anthropological approaches to law and legal processes have long suggested that state-made law has to be understood as a culturally embedded process and as but one form of prescriptive ordering among many others. If law is understood to be one normative system that, like others, serves to order human life, then why should we desire to take it apart? This is not to deny law’s efficacy in bringing resolve to human conflicts or to doubt the ethicacy and idealism with which many legal actors perform their work. […]