Drucilla Cornell

1. Introduction

Drucilla Cornell (1950–2022) was an American legal theorist, feminist philosopher, and political thinker whose work links critical legal studies, deconstruction, and ethical feminism. Writing primarily from the late 1980s onward, she sought to rethink law and rights so that they would acknowledge persons as open-ended beings whose identities, especially around gender and sexuality, are never fully fixed or exhaustively defined by existing social roles.

Her best‑known concept, the imaginary domain, names the ethical and legal space in which individuals can re-symbolize their gendered, sexed, and bodily existence. Proponents regard this idea as a distinctive contribution to feminist theory and jurisprudence, arguing that it moves beyond both liberal models of autonomy and some radical feminist accounts that treat identity as more determinate. Critics have questioned its legal practicability and its reliance on psychoanalytic and deconstructive vocabularies.

Cornell’s work is situated within, but not reducible to, the Critical Legal Studies (CLS) movement. She shared CLS’s skepticism about law’s neutrality and determinacy, yet she resisted purely nihilistic or cynical readings of legal indeterminacy, instead emphasizing an ongoing ethical demand of justice that can never be fully codified. To articulate this position, she drew on Jacques Derrida, Immanuel Kant, and psychoanalysis, while also engaging with popular culture, post-apartheid constitutionalism, and debates about revolution.

Within contemporary philosophy and legal theory, Cornell is often treated as a bridge figure: between continental and Anglo-American traditions, between feminist theory and jurisprudence, and between Northern academic debates and Southern struggles over ubuntu, dignity, and post-conflict justice. The following sections trace her life, intellectual development, main writings, and the critical debates her work has generated.

2. Life and Historical Context

Drucilla Cornell was born on 3 February 1950 in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and came of age amid the U.S. civil rights movement, second-wave feminism, and antiwar activism. Commentators often link this political backdrop to her later insistence that legal and philosophical questions remain tied to struggles over race, class, and gender. Before entering academia, she worked in the 1970s as a union organizer and labor activist, an experience that shaped her sensitivity to workplace injustice and labor politics.

Cornell earned her J.D. from the UCLA School of Law in 1981, entering legal scholarship at a moment when Critical Legal Studies was challenging the supposed neutrality and determinacy of law. She participated in CLS conferences and networks, while also engaging with feminist legal debates over pornography, abortion, and sexual harassment that were reshaping U.S. constitutional and employment law.

The broader intellectual environment of the 1980s and 1990s—marked by the Anglophone reception of French poststructuralism, especially Derrida and Lacan—provided a context for Cornell’s attempts to bring deconstruction into legal theory. Her collaborative work on Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice emerged from this milieu.

Historically, her career also intersected with the end of apartheid and the creation of South Africa’s 1996 Constitution. From the late 1990s onward, she traveled frequently to South Africa, participated in legal and philosophical discussions about ubuntu and constitutional interpretation, and engaged with post-apartheid debates about dignity and reconciliation.

Cornell held academic positions at institutions including Rutgers University, where she was Professor of Law, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Political Science. She died on 12 December 2022 in New York City. Her life and work unfolded across shifting debates about feminism, multiculturalism, and globalization, which provided the historical frame for her interventions in law and political theory.

2.1 Essential Chronology

3. Intellectual Development

Cornell’s intellectual trajectory is often described in phases that track her movement from labor activism through critical legal studies to global political theory.

3.1 From Labor Activism to Critical Legal Studies

Her early work as a union organizer led her to view law as intertwined with material power relations. Scholars note that this period underlies her later reservations about purely textual or discursive approaches to law. With her legal training at UCLA, she encountered Critical Legal Studies, adopting its critique of legal formalism and neutrality while questioning strands of CLS that, in her view, risked political paralysis or gender blindness.

3.2 Turn to Deconstruction and Continental Philosophy

In the mid‑1980s, Cornell immersed herself in Derrida and broader French theory. Through conferences and co-edited volumes, she helped introduce deconstruction to Anglophone legal audiences. Rather than treating deconstruction as a tool for exposing contradictions alone, she interpreted it as revealing an enduring ethical excess of justice beyond any legal rule. This reading set her apart from CLS colleagues who emphasized indeterminacy without articulating a corresponding ethical framework.

3.3 Ethical Feminism and the Imaginary Domain

During the 1990s, Cornell developed her distinctive ethical feminism in works like Beyond Accommodation and The Imaginary Domain. Drawing on Kantian respect, Lacanian psychoanalysis, and feminist theory, she argued that persons must be understood as not-yet-finished beings. Her concept of the imaginary domain emerged here as a way to connect this ethical insight to rights claims concerning abortion, sexual harassment, and pornography.

3.4 Global Justice, Ubuntu, and Late Political Theory

From the late 1990s onward, Cornell turned increasingly to post-apartheid South Africa, engaging with ubuntu, constitutional jurisprudence, and questions of reconciliation. In the 2010s, in collaborations such as The Spirit of Revolution, she revisited questions of humanism and revolutionary politics, critiquing masculinist and Eurocentric frameworks. Across these phases, commentators highlight a continuity: an effort to hold together critique of law’s limits with an affirmative ethical demand for justice and dignity.

4. Major Works

Cornell’s major works span legal theory, feminist philosophy, political theory, and cultural criticism. They are often grouped by thematic focus.

4.1 Key Monographs

4.2 Edited Collections and Collaborative Volumes

Interpretive literature often treats Beyond Accommodation and The Imaginary Domain as foundational for her feminist legal theory, The Philosophy of the Limit as central to her general jurisprudence, and The Spirit of Revolution as indicative of her later political concerns with humanism and global revolution.

5. Core Ideas and the Imaginary Domain

Cornell’s thought is structured around a cluster of interrelated ideas concerning personhood, rights, and the limits of law.

5.1 Personhood as “Not Yet Finished”

Central to her work is the claim that persons should be understood as unfinished, open-ended beings. Drawing on Kant’s notion of respect and psychoanalytic accounts of subject formation, she argues that ethical and legal orders must accommodate the possibility that individuals can reinterpret and re-symbolize who they are. Proponents see this as a way to resist both rigid identity categories and purely voluntarist models of selfhood.

5.2 The Imaginary Domain

The imaginary domain is Cornell’s most influential and debated concept. She describes it as the ethical and legal space each person requires to re-symbolize their gendered, sexual, and bodily existence beyond imposed roles.

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“The imaginary domain names the ethical and legal space in which each of us can project who we might become, re-symbolizing our sexed and gendered being beyond the identities imposed upon us.”

— Drucilla Cornell, The Imaginary Domain

Supporters interpret this as a proposal for a new kind of right—complementing existing privacy or autonomy rights—protecting the capacity to imagine and live out alternative gender and sexual identities. They suggest it offers a framework for understanding disputes over abortion, pornography, and sexual harassment without reducing them to either individual choice or group-based harm alone.

Critics question how such a domain could be legally specified without becoming either vacuous or overbroad. Some liberal theorists doubt whether it adds to established notions of autonomy and dignity, while some radical and materialist feminists worry that focusing on symbolic reconfiguration underplays structural and economic constraints.

5.3 The Philosophy of the Limit

Closely related is her philosophy of the limit, which holds that law and knowledge are inherently limited and that confronting these limits is a condition for ethical responsibility. On this view, the imaginary domain exists precisely because no legal order can fully determine or exhaust the meaning of personhood, gender, or justice.

6. Methodology: Deconstruction, Ethics, and Feminism

Cornell’s methodology combines deconstructive analysis, ethical argument, and feminist critique.

6.1 Deconstruction and Law

Influenced by Jacques Derrida, Cornell uses deconstruction to show that legal concepts are internally unstable and that judicial decisions cannot be fully deduced from rules. However, she emphasizes that this instability does not render justice meaningless; rather, it reveals an “infinite responsibility” that exceeds any determinate norm.

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“Justice is not a rule or a principle that we can finally codify in law; it is an infinite responsibility that calls law into question even as it demands that we decide.”

— Paraphrased from Cornell, Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice

Commentators note that, unlike some CLS writers who stress indeterminacy to undermine legal authority, Cornell treats deconstruction as an opening onto ethics.

6.2 Ethical Orientation

Her ethical feminism is grounded in a re-reading of Kantian respect: to respect another is to recognize them as a being who is “not yet finished” and must be granted the freedom to imagine themselves otherwise. She links this idea to the imaginary domain, arguing that ethical respect entails protecting each person’s imaginative self-creation.

Proponents see this as a distinctive bridge between deconstruction and normative ethics. Critics argue that her reliance on Kant and psychoanalysis may reintroduce problematic universalism or obscure material differences of race, class, and coloniality.

6.3 Feminist Method and Psychoanalysis

Cornell employs feminist critique to interrogate legal doctrines and cultural narratives, frequently drawing on Lacanian and object-relations psychoanalysis to analyze how gendered subjects are formed. She uses concepts such as sexual difference and recollective imagination to explore how individual and collective memories might be reworked.

Some feminist theorists appreciate her integration of psychoanalysis and deconstruction as an alternative to both liberal legalism and deterministic materialism. Others are skeptical of psychoanalytic vocabularies, questioning their empirical basis and political utility, particularly in non-Western contexts.

Overall, her methodology aims to hold together critical analysis of law’s instability, an ethical demand for respect and dignity, and a feminist focus on gendered embodiment and sexuality.

7. Key Contributions to Legal and Political Thought

Cornell made several widely discussed contributions to legal theory and political philosophy, especially regarding rights, justice, and constitutionalism.

7.1 Reframing Rights and Personhood

Building on the imaginary domain, Cornell reconceived rights not merely as protections of pre-given interests or identities but as conditions for ongoing self-symbolization. In debates on abortion, pornography, and sexual harassment, she argued that legal regimes should safeguard the capacity of individuals to imagine and pursue different gendered and sexual lives.

Supporters contend that this framework offers a richer account of autonomy and dignity than traditional liberal models, and better explains why certain practices (such as degrading sexual representations or coercive workplace environments) can harm persons even absent physical violence. Critics respond that her account risks being too abstract or subjective to ground concrete legal standards.

7.2 Justice, Indeterminacy, and the Limits of Law

Within jurisprudence, Cornell’s articulation of a “philosophy of the limit” contributed to debates on legal indeterminacy and the nature of justice. She argued that recognizing law’s inability to capture justice completely does not license cynicism; instead, it underscores the ethical responsibility attached to legal decision-making.

Comparative views can be mapped as follows:

7.3 Constitutionalism and Dignity

Cornell also contributed to constitutional theory, especially around the concept of dignity. In U.S. contexts, she argued that constitutional protections should be interpreted so as to sustain the imaginary domain. In South Africa, she linked dignity to ubuntu and transformative constitutionalism (developed further in Section 8). Proponents suggest that her work broadens constitutional discourse beyond proceduralism; critics question how her concepts can be operationalized in judicial practice.

8. Engagement with South Africa, Ubuntu, and Global Justice

From the late 1990s, Cornell became deeply involved with South African legal and philosophical debates, seeing in the country’s post-apartheid transition a testing ground for her ideas about dignity, reconciliation, and the limits of law.

8.1 Post-Apartheid Constitutionalism

Cornell engaged with the 1996 South African Constitution, which foregrounds human dignity, equality, and freedom. She examined how its transformative aspirations might be realized in practice, emphasizing that constitutional law in post-conflict societies must address both formal rights and the legacies of structural violence. Supporters of her work argue that she contributed to an understanding of transformative constitutionalism that highlights ethical and imaginative dimensions of legal change.

8.2 Ubuntu and Relational Dignity

Central to her South African work is the African ethical concept of ubuntu, often glossed as “a person is a person through other persons.”

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“Ubuntu asks us to think of dignity not as a possession of the isolated individual, but as something realized in and through our relations with others.”

— Drucilla Cornell, essays on ubuntu and constitutionalism

Cornell interpreted ubuntu as offering a relational understanding of personhood and dignity, which she brought into dialogue with her own notions of the imaginary domain and the philosophy of the limit. Proponents suggest that this cross-cultural engagement enriches both African philosophy and Western debates on communitarianism and relational autonomy. Some critics, however, warn of the risk of romanticizing ubuntu or abstracting it from concrete socio-economic struggles and internal African critiques.

8.3 Global Justice and Postcolonial Contexts

Beyond South Africa, Cornell wrote on global justice, including questions of sovereignty, human rights, and postcolonial transformation. She emphasized that any global legal order must reckon with histories of colonialism and racial capitalism. Scholars sympathetic to her approach see her as contributing to a deconstructive yet ethically oriented critique of international law. Others argue that while her theoretical insights are suggestive, they can be difficult to translate into specific institutional reforms or policy prescriptions.

9. Critique of Masculinity, Humanism, and Revolution

In her later work, Cornell extended her deconstructive and feminist commitments to critiques of masculinity, humanism, and traditional conceptions of revolution.

9.1 Masculinity and Cultural Representation

In Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity, Cornell analyzes Eastwood’s films as cultural texts that negotiate ideals of toughness, violence, vulnerability, and authority. She argues that these narratives both reinforce and subtly unsettle dominant forms of U.S. masculinity. Proponents of this line of work see it as demonstrating how legal and political norms are intertwined with cultural imaginaries of gender. Some critics suggest that film analysis may not significantly advance legal theory, or that it focuses heavily on white, U.S. masculinities to the exclusion of more varied global and racialized forms.

9.2 Critique of “Man” and Humanism

In texts culminating in The Spirit of Revolution, Cornell interrogates the figure of “Man” in Western humanism—often characterized as rational, autonomous, and implicitly male and Eurocentric. She argues that this ideal subject has structured both liberal and Marxist traditions, excluding or subordinating women, racialized groups, and non-human animals. Her account intersects with posthumanist and decolonial critiques, while retaining a commitment to dignity and ethical responsibility.

Supporters view this as a contribution to efforts to rethink the human beyond exclusionary norms. Critics question whether her proposals sufficiently differentiate between various strands of humanism or risk discarding valuable emancipatory resources associated with human rights discourse.

9.3 Rethinking Revolution

Cornell’s later work revisits revolutionary politics, contending that past models have often relied on masculinist heroism and teleological visions of history. With Stephen D. Seely, she calls for a “spirit of revolution” oriented toward ongoing experimentation, care, and the opening of new possibilities rather than a single decisive break.

Proponents see this as aligning revolutionary politics with her earlier themes of unfinished personhood and the imaginary domain. Critics argue that this reconceptualization may understate the need for structural rupture or underestimate the coercive capacities of existing institutions.

10. Reception, Debates, and Influence

Cornell’s work has been the subject of considerable discussion across law, philosophy, and feminist theory.

10.1 Reception in Legal Theory

Within Critical Legal Studies and critical jurisprudence, Cornell is recognized as a key figure in bringing deconstruction into legal debates. Many legal scholars cite Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice as a landmark. Supportive commentators praise her insistence that legal indeterminacy intensifies, rather than nullifies, the demand for justice. Skeptics contend that her approach leaves judges without clear guidance, or that it risks collapsing legal analysis into moral philosophy.

10.2 Debates in Feminist Theory

Her ethical feminism and imaginary domain have generated both enthusiasm and criticism. Some feminists, especially those influenced by psychoanalysis and continental theory, regard her as offering a powerful alternative to both liberal rights feminism and certain essentialist models of sexual difference. Others, including materialist, critical race, and queer theorists, question whether her focus on symbolic refiguration sufficiently addresses economic structures, racial hierarchies, and state violence.

10.3 Influence Beyond Law

Cornell’s influence extends to political theory, critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, and postcolonial scholarship, particularly through her work on ubuntu and South African constitutionalism. Some South African scholars and jurists draw on her writings when articulating dignity and transformative constitutionalism, while others consider her contributions more tangential to local doctrinal developments.

In cultural and film studies, her work on masculinity is cited in analyses of gendered representation. Overall, commentators agree that, whether embraced or contested, Cornell’s ideas have become reference points in debates on rights, subjectivity, and justice.

11. Legacy and Historical Significance

Assessments of Cornell’s legacy emphasize her role in reshaping conversations at the intersection of law, feminism, and continental philosophy.

First, many scholars credit her with helping to institutionalize deconstruction in legal theory. By framing Derrida’s ideas in terms accessible to Anglo-American jurisprudence, she influenced a generation of critical legal scholars who explore the relation between indeterminacy, responsibility, and justice.

Second, her concept of the imaginary domain is frequently cited in discussions of gender, sexuality, and rights, even by those who do not fully endorse it. It has informed debates on reproductive freedom, sexual harassment, and LGBTQ+ rights, especially where questions of identity, self-definition, and symbolic harm arise.

Third, her engagement with South African constitutionalism and ubuntu has been taken up in comparative constitutional law and global justice debates. Some commentators regard her as an important interlocutor in conversations about transformative constitutionalism and relational dignity; others see her work as part of a broader wave of Northern engagement with post-apartheid South Africa.

Finally, Cornell is often positioned historically as a bridge figure: between U.S. CLS and continental philosophy, between feminist legal advocacy and abstract ethics, and between Northern theory and Southern constitutional experiments. While debates over the practicality and scope of her proposals continue, commentators generally agree that her work opened enduring lines of inquiry into how law might respect persons as unfinished beings and how justice can be pursued within, and beyond, the limits of existing institutions.