A rhizomatic inquiry into legal classification: 'Taking differences', discourse, and domestic violence.

摘要

This dissertation is a discourse analysis of the categorization and classification of a cultural concept, domestic violence, in a specialized information system in a particular discipline, in this case law. The framework for critical inquiry is shaped from selected categorization and classification principles in the writings of information theorists and legal scholars, in combination with Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's rhizome model of system structures and processes. The principles of the rhizome-connection, multiplicity, heterogeneity, asignifying rupture, cartography, and decalcomania are applied in an analysis of the structure and processes of the legal information system. The vast structure of legal information was narrowed to the area of case law. Domestic violence, as a subject, provides further sharpening of focus. The research seeks understanding of the ways in which domestic violence is defined in legal information, particularly through court decisions. An analysis of the language used to represent domestic violence cases investigates the classification of cases in the legal databases, Westlaw and Lexis. The language is examined in terms of the representation of basic domestic violence issues—assault, battery, murder, rape, restraining orders, stalking, and torts. Common law is constructed through a process by which general cultural values become assimilated through specific cases, and the shaping power of precedent then reflects or projects these cultural principles back into society. Therefore, changes affecting the whole of society must occur in the structure, procedures, and codification of law. Because domestic violence is not easily defined or categorized, analysis explores the lingering power of coverture; the relational dynamics in the divisions between civil and criminal realms; legislative and judicial authority; and distinctions between public and private information as well as interdisciplinary influences such as outside fields as new terminology is established, thereby shaping and developing a new body of knowledge.