In this paper, I propose to disclose the potential of engaged and fragmented actions of “jury nullification” in experiencing the opportunity to act radically and bringing about social change. More specifically, I will argue that the genuine political dimension of disobedience does not lie in the moment of interruption neither in its stabilizing function. Disobedience represents rather a moment of re-politicization. By rendering visible the fractures of a political community (i.e., racism, discrimination, etc.), jury nullification inaugurates a process for addressing the problem of exclusion and subordination.
My argument will be structured as follow. In a first section, I will argue that the visibility and the opportunity to experience power-in-common it allows constitute jury nullification as a critically relevant form of disobedience. Moreover, jury nullification teaches us that norms and principles do not precede the political contest. They are rather created through, and experienced by, political action.
As both a legal decision and a political judgment, jury nullification discloses alternative ways of seeing and remaps the politics of the possible. I will therefore argue, in the third section, that the political role of disobedience appears if we accept to imagine jury nullification as a world-building practice. Conceived in this way, jury nullification indicates us a path to envision socio-political fractures as a common thing and to reconfigure community as an elongated experience, as an active engagement with the fractures that open up along the paths of judgment.
Theorists, it will be my conclusion, have to take part in such a politics of resistance and to contribute to the ongoing project of disclosing and challenging fractures.
