Siting Foreign Law: How Derrida Can Help

want to read what is, however, written. --Maurice Blanchot (1) Jacques Derrida was born to a Sephardic Jewish family near Algiers in 1930, in what was then French Algeria (at school, says Derrida, there was not a word about Algeria, a single one about its history and its geography, whereas we could draw the coast of Brittany or the Gironde estuary with our eyes closed). (2) As a child, Derrida was the victim of harsh anti-Semitism, which translated into his expulsion from the local French primary school in 1942 along with all other Jewish students. Five years later, plagued by adolescent anxieties, he was unsuccessful on his first attempt at the baccalaureat or high-school leaving assessment. He later moved to France, where in 1950 he failed the entrance examination at the prestigious Ecole normale superieure, France's training school for teachers, and did in fact succeed in being admitted to this institution for a further two years. His academic difficulties continued, and he subsequently foundered at the national concours d'agregation, which would have accredited him as a philosophy teacher. Only in 1956 did he finally qualify. Somewhat surprisingly given his checkered academic itinerary, within ten years or so Derrida had revealed himself as an extraordinarily gifted, challenging, and prolific philosophical mind. By the end of the 1970s, his work having been translated in numerous languages and his thought having found a receptive audience in a whole range of disciplines, Derrida had become the most influential voice within the crowded field of French philosophy. In 1998, the New York Times referred to him as the world's most famous philosopher--if the only famous philosopher. (3) Two documentary films were subsequently devoted to Derrida, which is perhaps another mark of his success. Jacques Derrida died in October 2004 having taught in Paris for more than forty years, acted repeatedly as visiting professor at a substantial number of distinguished U.S. universities, and given conferences all over the world. In an op-ed piece published in the New York Times days after his death, it was said that [a]long with Ludwig Wittgenstein and Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida ... will be remembered as one of the three most important philosophers of the 20th century. The author aptly remarked that [p]hilosophers, theologians, literary and art critics, psychologists, historians, writers, artists, legal scholars and even architects have found in his writings resources for insights that have led to an extraordinary revival of the arts and humanities during the past four decades. (4) I did beseech Derrida. Rather, he came to me through the very good fortune of a key encounter with a colleague to whom I continue to feel profoundly indebted. When I began reading De la grammatologie, Marges, and Positions, I had been teaching law for five years and was becoming more disappointed by the day as too many colleagues, reducing their scholarly mandate to that of compliant expositor of the law, promised more clarity, more stability, more harmony than they could ever deliver. Unusually, I was a teacher who harbored an interest in foreign law. To be sure, if one is a Canadian wishing to graduate from Canada, as I fervently did even before entering law school in Montreal, one has little choice but to devote oneself to foreign law. Yet, I took the matter one step further and, influenced by one of my professors, formed the view that foreign law could hold a significant and indeed crucial measure of normative purchase for judges and lawyers operating locally. My first paper, which I began writing after my initial year of law school, thus made the case for the transposition of a French precept to the law of obligations in Quebec through what I would now regard as some kind of Heideggerian leap. Given the way in which I was fashioning my scholarly life-in-the-law, I was rapidly--and willingly--instituted in an academic field known (problematically) as comparative law. …

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