1. The present article is based upon an oral presentation and retains much of the original character of delivery. It takes as its starting-point a lengthy historical analysis of the antirrhetic, Peter Goodrich, “Antirrhesis: The Polemical Structures of Common Law Thought,”Law and Rhetoric, A. Sarat and T. Kearns, eds. (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1993). Readers interested in the principal sources for the analysis of the antirrhetic should refer to that work.
2. The earliest references to antirrhesis as a rhetorical form are in Polybius,Histories, (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), at 22.8, referring to a discourse directed at those that “have betrayed their friends and kinsmen.” Hermogenes,On Types of Style(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) covers many of the topics of the antirrhetic in discussing sphodrotes, vehemence in style. As regards the English tradition, the only reference of which I am aware is to be found in Henry Peacham,The Garden of Eloquence(London: Jackson, 1593), at fol N iv b—O i a: “antirrhesis is a form of speech by which the orator rejecteth the authority, opinion or sentence of some person: for the error or wickedness of it…this form of speech doth especially belong to confrontation and is most apt to repell errors and heresies, and to reject evil counsell and lewd perversions.” Peacham's examples of such a genre are of Christ against Satan, Paul against the Epicureans and Job against his wife. The originalantirrheticiare those of Nicephorus against the iconoclasts,seeMarie-José Mondzain-Baudinet, ed.Nicephorus. Discours contre les Iconoclastes(Paris: Klincksieck, 1989).
3. For a preliminary analysis of outsider and law,seePeter Goodrich, “Eating Law: Commons, Common Land, Common Law,” 12Journal of Legal History246 (1992).See furtherthe suggestive histories presented in Julia Kristeva,Strangers to Ourselves(New York: Columbia University Press, 1991).
4. The reference is to Lord Keeper Finch, “My Lords [i.e., judges], it is your part to break the insolency of the vulgar before it approacheth too nigh the royal throne.” Cited in Wilfred Prest,The Rise of the Barristers: A Social History of the English Bar 1590–1640(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 253.
5. See Costas Douzinas and Ronnie Warrington, “A Well-Founded Fear of Justice,” 2Law and Critique115 (1991); Drucilla Cornell, “The Violence of the Masquerade: Law Dressed up as Justice,” 11Cardozo Law Review1047 (1990);see alsoAustin Sarat and Thomas P. Kearns, “A Journey through Forgetting” inThe Fate of Law, Austin Sarat and Thomas P. Kearns, eds. (Ann Arbor: Michigan University Press, 1991).