Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law - Steve Smith Book Event and Reception

Location

Warren Hall, Grace Courtroom 303

Cost

0

Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law - Steve Smith Book Event and Reception

School of Law students, faculty, and staff invited to attend, RSVP required

Is there any connection linking some of the maladies of modern life — “cancel culture,” the climate of mendacity in public and academic life, fierce conflicts over the Constitution, disputes over presidential authority? Fiction, Lies, and the Authority of Law argues that these diverse problems are all a consequence of what Hannah Arendt described as the disappearance of authority in the modern world. In this perceptive study, Steven D. Smith offers a diagnosis explaining how authority today is based in pervasive fictions and how this situation can amount to, as Arendt put it, “the loss of the groundwork of the world.”

Fictions, Lies, and the Authority of Law considers a variety of problems posed by the paradoxical ubiquity and absence of authority in the modern world. Some of these problems are jurisprudential or philosophical in character; others are more practical and lawyerly—problems of presidential powers and statutory and constitutional interpretation; still others might be called existential. Smith’s use of fictions as his purchase for thinking about authority has the potential to bring together the descriptive and the normative and to think about authority as a useful hypothesis that helps us to make sense of the empirical world. This strikingly original book shows that theoretical issues of authority have important practical implications for the kinds of everyday issues confronted by judges, lawyers, and other members of society.

**Masks are required inside all buildings. For the safety of all in attendance, please note that the consumption of food and/or beverages in law school buildings is prohibited.**