Tyrell Haberkorn In Conversation with Duncan McCargo

That's a great question.

I should start by noting that I am both inspired and indebted to a much broader wave of scholarship in feminist legal studies, where for at this point, almost 20 years, feminist legal scholars have been rewriting court cases from a variety of cases.

And so I had learned about this method.

And their idea is that rather than just writing a critique and saying how things should be, One thing that scholars who are interested in creating social and political change could do is instead make a court decision that they critique as unjust.

and then using the existing law, the existing evidence, rewrite it in a way that is more just, in a sense to both combine critique with thinking quite seriously about how under the current conditions in which we live, a more just decision might be rendered.

So I read about this method when I was starting to work on a project about court cases under the NCPO.

I initially wasn't planning on rewriting court decisions.

I was just going to critique what had happened in the courts.

And I thought it seemed like it might be an interesting way to think about the NCPO period.

I also didn't think it would be possible.

I assumed that the problems within the law were so deep that it wouldn't be possible to come up with different ways to think within the same law.

Happily, I turned out to be wrong.

And found that the unjust decisions that came out under the NCPO were a product of how judges chose to interpret the law and in doing so, how they followed a long, a long history of cruel jurisprudence that privileged the state over the people.

And so choosing to write in the form of decisions was a way to both critique and also think, okay, things could actually be different.

And this is how.

Right, because we also have a long section in the introduction which is called How to Read This Book, which was the first time I'd found such a section in the introduction to a book recently that I can remember anyway.

And there you suggest that some readers might skip most of the book's text and proceed to read the judgments themselves, aided by some of the background to the cases that you then provide in the introduction.

I guess that begs the question, to me at least, of who are the intended readers? Who do you think the people are that would read the book or would read the book in that way? And now that the book's been out for a couple of years, have you heard that there are people reading the book in this way? Or are there people who might be inclined more conventionally to skip the rulings and actually just read the other parts of the book?

My sense is that most readers have in fact taken a fairly straightforward conventional approach to reading and have just read straight through or have read the chapters with the shortened judgments.

I think the book could be read as just the judgments.

I think that if there were readers who were particularly interested in how judgments are written or were readers who were particularly interested in thinking about the book as an activist project, they might start there instead.

But the vast majority of the readers, as far as I know, have been academic readers who have treated it as an academic book.

And are the readers scholars outside Thailand? Are they Thais? Where do you think your audience lies?

It seems, from what I can tell from reviews and what both Thai and non-Thai scholars in legal studies who are interested in thinking about the book as a legal studies project.

I would love it if the book did reach readers beyond, but I'm not sure if it has.

That's a great question.

I should start by noting that I am both inspired and indebted to a much broader wave of scholarship in feminist legal studies, where for at this point, almost 20 years, feminist legal scholars have been rewriting court cases from a variety of cases.

And so I had learned about this method.

And their idea is that rather than just writing a critique and saying how things should be, One thing that scholars who are interested in creating social and political change could do is instead make a court decision that they critique as unjust.

and then using the existing law, the existing evidence, rewrite it in a way that is more just, in a sense to both combine critique with thinking quite seriously about how under the current conditions in which we live, a more just decision might be rendered.

So I read about this method when I was starting to work on a project about court cases under the NCPO.

I initially wasn't planning on rewriting court decisions.

I was just going to critique what had happened in the courts.

And I thought it seemed like it might be an interesting way to think about the NCPO period.

I also didn't think it would be possible.

I assumed that the problems within the law were so deep that it wouldn't be possible to come up with different ways to think within the same law.

Happily, I turned out to be wrong.

And found that the unjust decisions that came out under the NCPO were a product of how judges chose to interpret the law and in doing so, how they followed a long, a long history of cruel jurisprudence that privileged the state over the people.

And so choosing to write in the form of decisions was a way to both critique and also think, okay, things could actually be different.

And this is how.

Right, because we also have a long section in the introduction which is called How to Read This Book, which was the first time I'd found such a section in the introduction to a book recently that I can remember anyway.

And there you suggest that some readers might skip most of the book's text and proceed to read the judgments themselves, aided by some of the background to the cases that you then provide in the introduction.

I guess that begs the question, to me at least, of who are the intended readers? Who do you think the people are that would read the book or would read the book in that way? And now that the book's been out for a couple of years, have you heard that there are people reading the book in this way? Or are there people who might be inclined more conventionally to skip the rulings and actually just read the other parts of the book?

My sense is that most readers have in fact taken a fairly straightforward conventional approach to reading and have just read straight through or have read the chapters with the shortened judgments.

I think the book could be read as just the judgments.

I think that if there were readers who were particularly interested in how judgments are written or were readers who were particularly interested in thinking about the book as an activist project, they might start there instead.

But the vast majority of the readers, as far as I know, have been academic readers who have treated it as an academic book.

And are the readers scholars outside Thailand? Are they Thais? Where do you think your audience lies?

It seems, from what I can tell from reviews and what both Thai and non-Thai scholars in legal studies who are interested in thinking about the book as a legal studies project.

I would love it if the book did reach readers beyond, but I'm not sure if it has.