Dissertation Defense: Al Primack

This dissertation presents a psychoanalytic rhetorical study on more than two hundred years of judicial opinions to obscenity disputes (1708-1968). The author theorizes how rhetorical appeals to protecting children have functioned to establish different kinds of judicial subjectivity over the centuries, which rarely correspond to actual matters of children’s vulnerability and safety. The author argues that these appeals enabled judicial actors to perform the role of subject supposed to know: a performative representation of the rules, conventions, or protocols of law whereby judges serve as providers of stability to legal meaning. They retheorize stare decisis as both a practice of producing judicial authority and as a place-making activity that enables judges to forge spaces for themselves in the discourse of law. This project considers the broad social implications these discursive strategies have for children who are made vulnerable by the very same legal processes and concepts enacted to protect them.