WHAT DOES THE TURN TO EXEMPLARITY EXEMPLIFY?

In recent years, we have witnessed a scholarly turn to exemplarity (see, e.g. Gelley 1995; Ferrara 2008; Lowrie and Lüdemann 2015), including more specifically in the study of law (see, e.g., Del Mar 2013; Toracca 2017; Condello 2017a and b). This turn has contributed to enriching reflection on the universal (or, as sometimes put, general) and singular (or, as sometimes put, particular) and their relation. As Lowrie and Lüdemann write:

In law, the universal seems to take the shape of rules or norms and the singular that of facts. As Angela Condello puts it, ‘[t]here is no exemplarity without contradiction, without threshold, and without a gap separating facts and norms – a gap to be filled with a process of embodiment between … facts and norms’ (2017a: 9). As she also writes, ‘[t]he exemplary cases stand on the threshold between the bodies of rules and the world we inhabit: because it is from the world we inhabit that they emerge, but they get promoted to the level of the system of rules. Exemplarity thus mediates between the grammar of norms and the grammar of life’ (2017a: 9).

As I reflect on the turn to exemplarity, I am tempted to ask what the turn to exemplarity exemplifies. If the turn to exemplarity is a reminder of the inescapability of exemplification in human life and judgment, including in the practice of law, what does attending to this inescapability reveal? If the turn also suggests that (at least some) practices of exemplification are to be self-consciously cultivated, what might this cultivation entail and achieve? To what are practices of exemplification and, to perhaps coin a phrase, ‘cultures of exemplification’ alternatives (I think, for example, of scholarship regarding a shift from a ‘culture of authority’ to a ‘culture of justification’ in the South African context; Mureinik 1994) and what might they have to offer us for reflection, inspiration, even imitation?