Abstract
Cultural legal studies is the means through which the material becomes the jurisprudential. The cultural legal method enables the material artefacts to become a subject of legal and jurisprudential critique. This ‘becoming’ is not a ‘flattening’ but rather a transcendence—a movement beyond form—through a praxis which relates the experience of the legal within and through cultural artefacts to the reimagining, re-articulation, re-reading, and re-forming of law and jurisprudence. It is a semantic practice which aligns the actualisation of law with its affective resonance through material modes (text, medium, artefact).
This chapter undertakes a critical consideration of the cultural legal method to situate this practice as inherently legal in form. Despite the tendency of cultural legal analysis to frustrate and challenge structure (as practice, and as discipline), this chapter argues that the form of this exercise is legal by aligning the analogical form of this analysis with the analogical form of law. Through the institutional imagination of Roberto Unger and the exemplary works of William MacNeil and Desmond Manderson, this chapter situates analogy as the form of law and the cultural legal.