Legal codes constitute subjects through their performative, homogenizing power

Evidence

Codes must also be “systematic and clear,” arranged rationally and logically, and rendered easily accessible to lawyers and judges, the presumption always being that “traditional law” does not possess these rational and logical qualities. Codes are not only declaratory and enunciative of their own authority but also universal in the statement of rules, hence their concision. They pay direct attention neither to the particular case nor to the human individual as individual. They are always abstract, “to the point,” and deliberately preclusive of the concrete. It was considered a virtue that the “French and German Civil Codes could be held within the boards of a volume while the common law required a full library” to house it. Considerations of instrumentalized economy, as always, are paramount. But the primary attribute of the code is its capacity to create uniformity, an attribute in keeping with the homogenizing and universalizing ethic of modernity. The sway of the code’s authority therefore extends beyond its own legal, administrative, and regulatory power: the code possesses a performative power that, through the law, constitutes and reconstitutes subjects. — Wael Hallaq, Restating Orientalism, 264

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Berman’s Law and Revolution on the code tradition and to the reader’s interest in how legal form shapes subjecthood. — connects to: Legal structures both express and reinforce the distribution of power — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 3798
• SHARE: The French/German codes fitting in one volume vs. common law’s full library is a nice concrete detail for a legal scholar friend.