The mutuality of risk and community: the adjudication of community notification statutes

Although it has drawn significant attention in the legal literature, the ad judication of community notification statutes (often referred to as `Megan' s Law' in the United States) demonstrates a centrality of both risk and com munity that deserves attention from a governance perspective. In this paper , I focus on the ways in which concepts of risk and community are mutually constitutive, and how the adjudication of community notification statutes r elies on particular visions of `community' to engage particular ways of con ceiving of `risk', much of which relies on a rejection of expertise and a f ocus on `common sense'. This focus on `common sense', opens up new problema tics of government: courts adjudicating community notification cases are wo rking to define the particular mechanics of a state-civil society partnersh ip, and thereby operationalize the preventive state without rendering the s tate redundant or obsolete, and without opening the state to new forms of l egal and political accountability. While providing a case study in the move to advanced liberal governance in the area of criminal law, this adjudicat ion also reveals the contingent nature of risk, and the ways in which judic ial invocation of `risk' and its management can constitute liberal subjects who continue to rely on the state, while no longer expecting the state to be accountable for crime or its control.