“The Law and Late Modern Culture: Reflections on Between Facts and Norms from the Perspective of a Critical Cultural Legal Studies”

“The Law and Late Modern Culture: Reflections on Between Facts and Norms from the Perspective of a Critical Cultural Legal Studies”

“The Law and Late Modern Culture: Reflections on Between Facts and Norms from the Perspective of a Critical Cultural Legal Studies” (with Jonathan Cohen). Symposium Issue on Jürgen Habermas. University of Denver Law Review 76: 1029-1055.

Abstract: It would be impossible to do justice to as large and as ambitious a work as Between Facts and Norms — nevertheless the entirety of Professor Habermas’s theoretical edifice. In his early work, Habermas asserted that under the altered conditions of the late twentieth century, the bourgeois model of the public sphere was no longer viable. Critics of the bourgeois public sphere idealized in Habermas’s early work suggested that the so-called universal categories of this space of ideal communication — public and private, speech and property, political and nonpolitical — were both exclusionary and elitist. As Nicholas Garnham puts it, what political theory still fails to grasp is that what has also come to be mediated is the content of communication itself. Today’s spaces of civil society, public spheres, and emergent counterpublics are fundamentally different from those of the bourgeois public sphere whose demise Habermas has famously lamented. Today’s spaces of civil society, public spheres and counterpublics are fundamentally different from those of the bourgeois public sphere that Habermas holds in such high regard.

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Date Published: 1999
Publisher: University of Denver Law Review
Publisher Website: https://www.law.du.edu/denver-law-review