ABSTRACT
The trial transcript, along with statements surrounding the trial, offers an insight into Emma Goldman’s and more generally the anarchists’ relationship to law. Goldman was not afraid of the law or of punishment. Goldman never saw law as the author of her life. Goldman’s attitude to law was elaborated in the 1917 trial. Indeed in this trial Goldman gave a remarkable speech to the jury where she propagated her anarchist beliefs as much as she demonstrated the limits of law. Like Goldman’s approach, general jurisprudence points to the inconsistencies within the law. Law’s formula for delivering justice for the asylum seeker is inherently corrupted by the disparity between how law describes the ground for seeking asylum and how it asks proof to be advanced. Anarchists call for the complete destruction of law because they understand that law’s very constitution is steeped in its inability to follow the flow and changes in life.
