Governed By Law?

Abstract

Another consequence of this development of bio-power was the growing importance assumed by the action of the norm at the expense of the juridical system of the law... I do not mean to say that the law fades into the back ground or that the institutions of justice tend to disappear, but rather that the law operates more and more as a norm, and that the judicial institution is increasingly incorporated into a continuum of apparatuses (medical, adminis trative, and so on) whose functions are for the most part regulatory. A nor malizing society is the historical outcome of a technology of power centred on life. (Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality Vol. 1, 1979: 144)