ABSTRACT
I do not want to ask questions about the nature of law as if law were a thing that could, perhaps must, have a nature in something of the same way that dogs or people or even rivers or oceans are thought to have natures. Those questions seem nothing more than endless rehearsals for a reaffirmation of the status quo, another purported discovery legitimating business as usual. I have other fish to fry, other questions to ask. I am interested, not simply in the nature of law, but in the speech of judges, in all those different things judges do with words that go to make up the performance we call judgment. Judgment let us say as theatre. And by performance I mean total performance, beginning to end, from the moment the case appears on the docket to the moment at which judgment is final and cannot be called back. I am interested in questions of voice, of presence and absence, of the possibility of the feminine in or as judgment.
