Malevolent Legalities draws upon archival research conducted at the Scalia Papers at the Harvard Law School Historical and Special Collections to examine the influence of Justice Antonin Scalia's judicial philosophy of "textualist-originalism" on the US Supreme Court's antidiscrimination jurisprudence. The book focuses on six US Supreme Court cases, organized into two parts. The main argument of the book, grounded in archival and legal materials, is that textualist-originalism makes it lawful for discrimination to be performed through the text, and explicitly seeks to prevent progress by enacting a regime of "static law".

In Shelby County v. Holder (2013), Justice Ginsburg remarked that discrimination today behaves like the Hydra, the many-headed serpent in Ancient Greek mythology which regenerates each time its head is severed. The analysis of archival and legal materials is therefore prefaced by the development of a unique methodology for studying discrimination called discriminatology, understood as a framework for analyzing how discrimination persists through time, is performed through the text, and is a product of the manipulation of legal speech. In this way, Malevolent Legalities approaches the study of textualist-originalism as itself a vehicle for discrimination performed mala fide or "in bad faith."

About the Author

Kevin S. Jobe is assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley.

Reviews

Kevin Jobe philosophically advances judicial skepticism to show how the US Supreme Court's use of textualism and originalism is performative discrimination. Jobe's brilliant analyses uncover the racial injustice in recent "colorblind" rulings by the Court. Malevolent Legalities unmasks the juridical foundations of current backlash against social progress toward equality. This is a must read for scholars of politics and jurisprudence, Left and Right.

-- Naomi Zack, Lehman College, CUNY

The "Rule of Law" is the proposition that no one and no law is above the law. This regime, or ideology, has created a system of legality to which we submit in the belief of the original proposition. However, as we are all too painfully aware, our histories are entangled with what Jobe calls "malevolent" legalities. This is a most important contribution to what we can call the aporia of law: law is unlawful itself and law is what creates the order in which we live.

-- Eduardo Mendieta, Pennsylvania State University



Book Information
ISBN 9781683934028
Author Kevin S. Jobe
Format Hardback
Page Count 308
Imprint Fairleigh Dickinson University Press
Publisher Fairleigh Dickinson University Press