A Civil Death

Author : Tanya Monforte
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (131 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!

Download or read book Theory of Civil Death written by Tanya Monforte and published by . This book was released on 2022 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This dissertation proposes a new theory of civil death that highlights the change in legal status as a technology of power in global security practices. Civil death, or death of the legal person, is often defined as the lawful abrogation of civil rights as a consequence of a criminal conviction. Although the legal definition of civil death is not normally considered controversial, a socio-legal survey of the many uses of the term inside and outside legal practice demonstrates that this definition limits the scope of conceptual inquiry. The readily available theories of civil death fall short of conveying the complexity and legal specificity of the concept. The theories of civil death outside law are often devoid of nuanced legal analysis, while simultaneously the legal uses of the concept are frequently under-theorized and cannot illuminate the significance of the re-emergence of the term at this moment. The inquiry of the dissertation starts with an observation that the term civil death appears today in various places around the world after being considered a practically defunct legal institution in the twentieth century. In the United States, the concept has resurfaced in recent decades as a salient category for social and legal explanation about mass conviction in respect to post-conviction collateral consequences. It is frequently claimed that the origins of civil death are found in outlawry or infamia. Although civil death is often defined in relation to its history, a deep dive into the ways the concept was being constituted at the moment of its decline in the civil and common law traditions in the nineteenth century, reveals a somewhat different narrative than the typical teleological account. Additionally, the concept of civil death is used for political analysis in countries across the globe in different ways. In Turkey, commentators refer to the government confiscation of passports and the purge of political dissidents from university and civil service posts absent a conviction as a civil death in the name of national security. In India, activists have protested a national biometric registry on the grounds that it could facilitate civil death. While these cases are significant, there are many more cases and diverse uses of the concept. By meticulously mapping out the disparate uses of the term including formal state law, activist campaigns, and political theory a wide variety of uses of the concept surface. Civil death has been used in relation to incarceration, security practices, conservatorships, slavery, statelessness, marriage, and internment camps to name only a few examples. In the many contexts, the term is used somewhat differently with varying legal consequences and legal forms. For my theory, I tease out a "category of analysis" and propose a new framework for civil death as a concept that denotes an invisible transition to one of several privative or formally unequal statuses in law. With a clear concept of civil death, the dissertation can shift its focus to contemporary securitization practices to grasp the novelty of the neoliberal configurations of civil death techniques that use legal statuses in conjunction with intelligent or predictive policing for social control. Civil death is emerging now because it is capable of controlling potential threat. In general terms, the analysis allows one to use the term coherently across its different uses, and also apprehend what the resurrection of civil death means at this moment in time"--