The Law Is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons

Do we know what a prisoner goes through? Most of us don't, and some of us may hold the view that any suffering in prison is well-deserved, after all, isn't that why the prisoners are there? Do we care what a slave thinks about? Do we think there are slaves in this day? Do we think that the law gains its majesty because it protects the weak, the mild, and the downtrodden? Do we think that concern for prisoners, slaves, and dogs have no business when one talks about the glory and grandeur of the law? Dayan discusses all these questions in "The Law Is a White Dog". The "white dog" was an old Haitian reference to a ghost dog that was the spiritual embodiment of a dead person whose stolen spirit returns to inhabit the canine body. The dog appears white because its skin turns white when it is no longer the animal bestowed with its natural colour. Such is the fate of those the law sweeps aside in its pretence at nobility. It was also partially a gleaned from Vicki Hearn's novel, "The White German Shepherd" for its "evocation by the dog of the dog within the dog."Dayan who is not a lawyer, manages to pound her story with innumerable legal cases, laced with the allegories of fictional stories such as Uncle Tom's Cabin. In Stambovsky v Ackley, Judge Israel Rubin (in the New York Supreme Court) made the startling pronouncement "[A]s a matter of law, the house is haunted" in order to give the purchasers a right to recover their deposit when they learnt that the house was occupied by friendly ghosts. Facts often do not matter. The law changes the perspectives and thus, the consequences of facts. Another example given by Dayan was Bell v Wolfish, a decision of Justice Rehnquist in 1979 in which the Supreme Court endorsed the prisons treatment of pre-trial detainees in the same way as convicted felons. The facade of nobility after Dayan had torn it down, brick by brick, shows the ugliness and shame of the ignorant, hypocritical, and sadistic "human" beings that twists and moulds the law and what she reveals of it, the spirit of that law, is no more than a twisted spectre unrecognisable to us. Thanks to her, that spectre is now apparent, and it is what we need to reform if we are to see the law truly in its majesty.The book examines a range of legal lexicons, devoting a chapter to the case of Bailey v Poindexter's Executor, the absurd approach of the law when dealing with a slave owner's legacy granting freedom to his slaves upon the condition that they make a choice of buying their own freedom or remaining as slaves, in which event, they would be sold publicly and the money paid to the testator's family. The outcome of a long legal process resulted in favour of the heirs - slaves had no capacity for choice. They remained slaves. This book is about "what [it] means to exist in a negative relation to the law."

I understand why the author uses the language she does - because she is desconstructing a set of laws written with intentional ambiguity so as to render the weak powerless.This is a critically important book that explains so much about how civil rights violations go unpunished in this country - and globally.For anyone who falls into the legal trap of legally-undefined identity - and there are so many who do - this is a must read.Never define yourself using terms of he State - black, white, slave, etc. Define your nationality - not continentality. Your legal rights depend on the distinction.

I GOT IT

Though the argument a bit unclear, I found the discussion of the legal creation of unpersons challenging and disturbing. Still, I do not see how Dayan can justify the claim that such things are wrong.,

There is a new genre of American Literature -- Word Salad. This is a whole book of word salad nonsense. Read the samples. It's just garbage.