The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons by Colin Dayan

This book examines the ways that the law has been used to manipulate the boundaries of the human--especially in the case of enslaved persons and prisoners. Dayan posits that forms such as zombies, ghosts, and dogs appear in literature and culture in response to the ways that the law can be deployed to take away someone's humanity. The book covers a broad time period (dealing with cases in US law from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first) and it combines sources and techniques from a variety of fields, including the law, history, and literature, to end in a stunning indictment of legal systems that take away people's humanity and an exposé of how the cruelest forms of punishment may be written off as administrative conveniences. All in all, a persuasive and useful monograph, and a model for a radical, engaged form of criticism.