Colin Dayan's The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons is a tour de force of interdisciplinary legal scholarship. The book's main objective is, as Dayan puts it, “to ask how law encapsulates, sustains, and invigorates philosophies of personhood” (p. xii). She approaches this question with the sensibilities of a humanist interested in understanding law's negotiations with those at the edge of the category human—slaves, felons, and animals—and with what she describes as “the obscene made lawful: slavery, torture, indefinite solitary confinement, preventive detention” (p. xii). Given that focus, the book makes a forceful set of moral claims about both the injustices done in these legal negotiations and, less sanguinely, about their inevitability.

At the dark heart of this critical genealogy and at the center of The Law is a White Dog lies a four-year engagement Dayan undertook with Arizona's prison system: its supermax facilities, its chain gangs, its administrative policies. Witnessing the psychological decimation of inmates in such a context provokes Dayan into an analysis of the way Eighth Amendment jurisprudence, particularly the Supreme Court's recent interpretations of “cruel and unusual,” has left behind concerns of the effects of incarceration on inmates' souls in the attempt to discern and judge officials' states of mind. In those cases, “cruel” comes to be equated not with a felt sense of pain but with malicious intent. Such an emptying out of inmates' identity in that setting provokes Dayan toward a more general investigation of the legal production of “negative personhood.” Employing an interdisciplinary approach that emphasizes the constitutive power of legal rhetoric, the inevitable persistence of modes of categorizing entities on the margins, and the magical thinking that conjures and parries otherness when it comes into contact with law, Dayan gives us, through close and careful readings of texts, a history replete with stunningly fresh insights into the transformational violence law inflicts and legitimizes on those it regulates and controls.

Ghosts run throughout this book: real ghosts in haunted houses, recognized by courts; sacred apparitions like the white dog that make strange our presumptions about the meaning of identity and threat; ancient legal ideas that haunt contemporary legal logics. Dayan hones in particular on the medieval concepts of civil death, corruption of blood, and the deodand—a thing without consciousness (whether object or animal) to which evil will is imputed and liability imposed.Footnote ¹ This “primitive” model of imposing guilt without assessing individual responsibility persists, Dayan argues, in antebellum decisions concerning the incapacity of slaves to be choosing agents, in gilded age analogies between animals and racialized others, in Eighth Amendment cases concerning state-imposed violence in prisons, and in U.S. policies toward terrorists. Treating humans as animals, animals as property, and property as outside the circle of human recognition, courts have sanctioned degradation by negotiating, as Dayan puts it, “the terms by which personality is recognized, threatened, or removed” (p. xii). The ghosts of those degraded, in turn, haunt law and its claims to being modern and civilized, invested in individual dignity and equality, and governed by reason.

To try to capture Dayan's rich analysis in a crisp summary is, however, to do her project an injustice. Over the course of seven chapters, she ranges broadly across centuries and texts (juxtaposing Maitland, Blackstone, and Locke with stories of vodou and zombies, autobiographical narrative, Melville novels, NGO reports, and dog law) in a distinctive narrative voice, one that infuses remarkable and incisive rhetorical analyses of legal opinions with historical and anthropological coloration, no doubt emerging from her prior work on Caribbean literature, religion, and history. In form, the book is non-linear, allusive, less interested in causality than resonance. It might productively have defined some of its key terms more clearly, particularly the idea of ritual; and those interested in legal history may wish for more particularity and care with the use of historical sources. While some readers accustomed to sharp writerly outlines may find her approach elusive, it is Dayan's stated desire to walk the reader through the landscape of a world “without demarcations such as those between past and present, primitive and civilized” (p. xiii) in order to inhabit her central claim: that reason and unreason conjoin in modern law. The interleaving of her sources gives the book real analytic purchase both because of the originality of their juxtapositions and the trenchant analyses Dayan offers to persuade us of their conceptual interconnections. Again and again she asks: when or who or what does law render less than fully human? In what contexts and with what effects? In revealing law's unvarying answers to those questions, and in making legal reasoning “blooded and vital” (p. xvii), Dayan reveals legal judgment to be a matter of sorcery, not logic. Conjuring for its readers that endlessly persistent and maleficent power, The Law is a White Dog makes a moral case that demands reckoning.