Peter Goodrich as I Imagine Him: The Man, the Mos, the Legendre

Abstract

Goodrich’s law veers towards the invisible. Obsessed with images, his concerns are invariably with what cannot be seen. Detectable in his work is always a desire to see the invisible, to capture the articulation of immaterial principle, structure, and imaginal form. To witness an image, and acknowledge it as—at best—an entry point to the infinite depths, mobility, and power of an unseen realm. Across the corpus of his work, this relentless desire produces an emergent jurisprudence that interrogates the formation and appearance of the juristic itself, sought across a range of contexts, but always tracing the invisible movements of principle and doctrine and their dogmatic control that lurk beyond the surface of the text, the madnesses of legal desire and their symptomatic structures and traditions of reading. This paper, encountering and working solely within the archive of Goodrich’s published work, constructs for its reader an overview of my own imaginary form of the man himself, followed by an articulation of the traditions—the mos—of interpretive practices he and his work (if they are separable) can be imagined to excavate from law’s own archive of images, leading—irrefragably—to the Legendrean stage upon which Goodrich builds his jurisprudential show.