Title
Professor of Rhetoric

Department
Dept of Rhetoric


Faculty URL
http://rhetoric.berkeley.edu/people.php?page_id=1056&p=58

Email
constable@berkeley.edu

Phone
(510) 642-2176


Search UC Berkeley Directory





Research Expertise and Interest
law and language, legal rhetoric and philosophy, social and political thought, Anglo-American legal history, continental philosophy, law and society

Research Description
Marianne Constable is a widely interdisciplinary legal scholar whose work on law crosses into both humanities and social sciences. Recipient of the James Boyd White Award from the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities in 2011, she is the author of Our Word is Our Bond: How Legal Speech Acts (Stanford U. Press, 2014), ?Just Silences: the Limits and Possibilities of Modern Law (Princeton U. Press, 2005), and The Law of the Other: The Mixed Jury and Changes in Conceptions of Citizenship, Law and Knowledge (U. of Chicago Press, 1994; winner of the Law and Society Association's J. Willard Hurst Prize in Legal History). ?An expert on law and language, she has co-edited two books on law and society and written numerous articles on such topics as Foucault and immigration law, Nietzsche and jurisprudence, the rhetoric of "community," Arendt and the rhetoric of sustainability, and the role of law in the liberal arts. She was a member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton during 2005-06. ?Having recently stepped down as Department Chair, she is currently (2014-15) a Fellow at Stanford University's Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where she is writing a history of the "new unwritten law" that ostensibly exonerated women who killed their husbands in Chicago a hundred years ago. ?
The first recipient of the the Zaffaroni Family Chair in Undergraduate Education (2009-2014), Constable's commitment to teaching is also attested to by her receipt of a Distinguished Undergraduate Research Mentoring Award and the Sarlo Distinguished Graduate Student Mentoring Award. She has served on numerous editorial boards and prize committees (including the Bateson Prize in anthropology) and is a certified practitioner of the Feldenkrais Method.