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Law and Memory

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Law’s Memories

Part of the book series: Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies ((PSLS))

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Abstract

This chapter establishes how collective commemorative events can come to be thought of as a resource of law, or as quasi-legal institutions. It underscores how the relationship between memory and law can be considered on the basis of law as a product of memory, rather than memory as an effect or object of law. The argument that this chapter makes is that understandings of and receptiveness to state laws is substantiated in behaviours which are grounded in a reliance on particular mnemohistorical narratives of a collective past. In order to make this argument, this chapter considers both the social significance of collective memory and how law can be thought of as a product of a plurality of distributed institutions, actors, and ideologies. In this context, memory’s social significance can be established on the basis that it is one among many contributors to a plural conception of law. This chapter sets this out by identifying how memory informs juridically significant notions of belonging and recognition. Equally, it identifies memory as being involved in situational legal meaning-making and in legal socialization processes.

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  1. University of Kent, Canterbury, UK

    Matt Howard

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Howard, M. (2023). Law and Memory. In: Law’s Memories. Palgrave Socio-Legal Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19388-0_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-19388-0_2

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