Killing Time: Law Like Death

Abstract

This article takes Peter Fitzpatrick’s writings on the modern death penalty, published over roughly a decade from the late 1990s, as a point of departure for considering wider themes in his scholarship, and reflecting on its significance and particular qualities. In these texts we see Fitzpatrick, as a legal theorist, engaging with a pressing political issue of, literally, life, death and the law. I take this textual archive and show how it illustrates Fitzpatrick’s mode of critique, his form of poststructural legal normativity, and the kinds of resistant and responsiveness-generating legal subjects he encourages us to be.