Law by Night

“Bringing a highly sophisticated theoretical mind to a richly woven thick description of legal practices, Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller asks how our conceptions of law would change if we thought about it from a metaphor of darkness. Throughout this fascinating and thought-provoking book, he attends to how public imaginaries of darkness are affected by race and gender and how the law of the dark has an ambiguous relation to human freedom and security. As he demonstrates, the law is obscure, complex, and lacks transparency—this is the law’s own essential darkness.” - Linda Ross Meyer, author of Sentencing in Time

“In this highly original and intellectually creative book Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller recognizes that night is a real part of our temporal and material worlds as well as a metaphor for absence—the time and place where normal law is in abeyance. It is this confluence of the literal, conceptual, and metaphorical that makes Law by Night distinct. Goldberg-Hiller’s juxtaposition of a variety of legal issues never previously brought together under the theme of night is nothing short of brilliant.” - Cressida J. Heyes, author of Anaesthetics of Existence: Essays on Experience at the Edge

"A truly socio-legal text, it offers generative interventions for law and society scholars working at the intersections of race, gender, violence, and the corporeal. Similarly, scholars looking for a unique study in jurisprudence with provocative insights on ontology and temporality will find much to engage with in Law By Night. This book will leave readers thinking anew the shadowy nocturnal places of law that remain unexplored in their own work." - Lindsay Massara, Law and Society Review

"Jonathan Goldberg-Hiller offers us a book which can be an excellent example of legal theory that remains grounded in reality, and closely connected to the power from which it emerges." - Dimitra Mareta, Philosophy in Review

“[Goldberg-Hiller’s] journey into law’s night provides us with a counter-narrative in which ‘freedom and community’ can be found.”