bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
'Sakaarson the World Breaker': violence and différance in the political and legal theory of Marvel's sovereign
Authors: Lloyd Chris
Published: November 2024

The graphic novels Planet Hulk and World War Hulk feature the green goliath of the Marvel Universe, The Incredible Hulk (Hulk, or the Hulk, hereafter) as the protagonist in two tales both which deal with gladiatorial violence and sovereignty. The novels feature classic archetypal comic narratives such as violence leading to retribution, law leading to justice and sovereignty leading to rule. However the novels feature pervasive critiques which imbue these homogenous narratives, leading to their subversion. These normalising narratives of le politique are thus warped into alternate manifestations, wherein violence breeds total annihilation, law succumbs to mutation and sovereignty implodes to nothing. Consequently the novels feature an unusual yet poignant subversion of the traditional metaphysics of political and legal theory.
Justice in the gutter: representing everyday trauma in the graphic novels of Art Spiegelman
Authors: Crawley Karen , van Rijswijk Honni
Published: November 2024

Trauma studies has had a long relationship with legal studies. Shoshana Felman argues that ‘trauma – individual as well as social – is the basic underlying reality of the law’ (2002: 172). The law has made available certain forms for the representation and adjudication of traumatic experience. Among others, testimony and the trial are legal forms that offer the potential for justice for traumatic events, at the same time that they delimit the ways in which trauma can be understood (Felman 2002; Sarat et al 2007). The means by which trauma is represented determines which experiences are privileged and recognized – which also means that some harms will become invisible under certain frameworks. Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law’s version of justice.
Comic book mythology: Shyamalan’s Unbreakable and the grounding of good in evil
Authors: Peters Timothy D
Published: November 2024

‘It’s a classic depiction of Good versus Evil’ Elijah Price tells the potential buyer of a piece of art. This ‘piece of art’ is an early sketch of a battle between two characters in a comic book and is on display at Price’s art gallery, Limited Edition, in the world of M. Night Shyamalan’s 2000 film Unbreakable. Popular culture is replete with such dualities of Good and Evil – the good hero invariably battling the evil villain. One of the clearest spaces where this battle is given visual and bodily form is in the comic book superhero genre that Shyamalan draws upon in Unbreakable and to which Elijah Price is referring. While this genre is inherently absorbed with matters of justice, legality and criminality – and of Good and Evil – it has traditionally been dismissed as not only a form of popular culture and mere entertainment but as the lowest form of popular culture – that is, as ‘crude, poorly-drawn, demi-literate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare…’ (McCloud 1993: 3).
'What had been many became one': continuity, the common law, and Crisis on Infinite Earths
Authors: Authers Benjamin
Published: November 2024

We don’t usually think that lawyers and comic book readers have much in common. Certainly, unflattering representations and stereotypes of each abound. Less obviously, perhaps, each also has a disciplinary veneration of the accumulation of textual knowledge and of often obscure narrative detail. For the contemporary comic book reader, there are voluminous collections of past stories, reprinted in hardcover, paperback, and digitally. Taken together, these offer a rich body of fictional work to be consumed for its own sake, as well as to enhance the enjoyment of new stories printed in hundreds of monthly titles. For lawyers, the corpus of case law, an archive whose mastery is one of the ostensible aims of legal training in common law jurisdictions, acts in a similar fashion, having meaning itself as well as giving legal consequence and context to the matter in dispute.
Contents, acknowledgements and contributors
Authors: Gomez Romero Luis , Dahlman Ian
Published: November 2024

Anyone who has enjoyed the experience (largely gratifying but also, at certain moments, downright exhausting) of participating in an editorial project knows that the final product reflects not only the work of those who are credited in it, but also a crowd of invisible contributions that aided its coming into the world. We would like to express our deepest gratitude to Enrique Torralba, who generously designed the cover of this volume. We would also like to thank the Law Students’ Association and the Faculty of Law’s Dean at McGill University, who each provided us with funds for the copyright clearances for many images reproduced in the following pages, as well as the prize money for the creative submission contest that resulted in the inclusion of John Hanamy’s work. Ana Merino, Desmond Manderson and Julia Quilter also graciously volunteered their time as jurors for the contest - thank you for your time and judicious acumen.
Spider-Man, the question and the meta-zone: exception, objectivism and the comics of Steve Ditko
Authors: Bainbridge Jason
Published: November 2024

The idea of the superhero as justice figure has been well rehearsed in the literature around the intersections between superheroes and the law. This relationship has also informed superhero comics themselves – going all the way back to Superman’s debut in Action Comics 1 (June 1938). As DC President Paul Levitz says of the development of the superhero: ‘There was an enormous desire to see social justice, a rectifying of corruption. Superman was a fulfillment of a pent-up passion for the heroic solution’ (quoted in Poniewozik 2002: 57).
Chewing in the name of justice: the taste of law in action
Authors: Lam Anita
Published: November 2024

The first issue of John Layman and Rob Guillory’s Chew was released in June 2009 by Image Comics at a time when the American comic book market was so dominated by stories written within the superhero genre that ‘comic books and superheroes [had] almost become synonyms’ (Rhodes 2008: 6). Within this superhero market, Chew was remarkably not a comic book about a superhero. Instead, Chew is a New York Times bestselling, Eisner award-winning series about Tony Chu, a Chinese- American cibopath. As a neologism created by the comic’s authors, cibopathy describes the ability to receive psychic impressions from whatever one eats. Although Chu has this extraordinary ability, he does not have a secret identity, a costume, an origin story or a mission to save the world from evil. Instead, Tony works as a detective for the American Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in a possible future where the FDA has become the most powerful government agency in the world. While the Department of Homeland Security enhanced the scope of police powers as a result of the catastrophic events associated with September 11 in our reality, the FDA has done the same in response to the devastating events associated with an avian flu epidemic in Chew’s alternate reality.
The story of Bohemia or, why there is nothing to rebel against anymore
Authors: Hanamy John
Published: November 2024

[Description: cartoon images with initial text "A long time ago the rich and the poor did much the same things in their leisure time...They both drank a lot...Had sex at the drop of a hat..."]
The truth in painting: cultural artefacts as proof of native title
Authors: Anker K.
Published: November 2024

On the front cover of the Oxford Companion to Aboriginal Art and Culture an Aboriginal man in a red loin cloth appears dancing on a brightly coloured canvas. He is dwarfed by the size of the painting, and is doubly lost amid the 'riotous colour', the lines, circles and swirls of his platform, the Ngurrara Canvas II. This is Nyilpirr Spider Snell, an artist from the Kimberley/Great Sandy Desert region of North Western Australia, performing the Kurtal -- or snake dreaming dance -- in Canberra to 'remind those sitting on the High Court of the depth of [his peoples'] claim' (Native Title Newsletter 2002: 4).
Keeping on the windy side of the law: the law of the beach
Authors: Mooney A.
Published: November 2024

Going to the beach in Australia is a way of getting to the borders of nowhere in the sense that no-one lives on the beach. It is under limited circumstances that one can say 'Come to the beach'; it is somewhere only to 'go'. Like death, one only goes. But unlike death, one comes back, repeatedly (cf Derrida 1979). The repetition and pleasure of death are at the centre of the beach experience. Once you step onto the sand you are in a space away from life, set away from the city, set away from normal civilisation. Yet the everyday follows you, for though this is the beach, it is still the world. It is a place of being and becoming. Whether you will come back would depend on how you 'hold acquaintance with the waves' (Twelfth Night I ii).
Taking 'land use' seriously: toward an ontology of municipal law
Authors: Valverde M.
Published: November 2024

Municipal and quasi-municipal authorities have regulated activities and persons by exercising control over access to and use of spaces and municipal regulations targeting spaces but acting on groups of persons are scrutinized in the US and Canada, by those concerned with the rights of dispossessed urban groups. Land use is specific to planning and at the local level, 'use' is an absolutely crucial legal technology whose effects are best understood if 'governing through use' is contrasted to 'governing through persons'.
Cultural Imaginary, the Rule of Law, and (Post-) Colonialism in Indonesia: Perspectives from Pramoedya Ananta Toer’s This Earth of Mankind
Authors: Thomas Jeffrey E.
Published: November 2024

This article focuses on culture and rule of law in Indonesia, which provides an excellent case study in colonialism and post-colonialism. The colonial heritage of the Indonesian islands goes back to the early 1500s and lasted for approximately four centuries (Schultz 2002:144- 145) until independence was declared in August 1945 (GoGwilt 1996: 158). This Earth of Mankind by Pramoedya Ananta Toer is an appropriate text through which to view the issues surrounding colonialism and post-colonialism because it represents the struggle of a Native Indonesian with various colonial institutions at the turn of the 19th Century; these struggles have been chronicled by an author who lived through colonial rule, Japanese occupation, and liberation. In addition, the narrative is interesting because Parmoedya1 had been imprisoned by the Colonial Dutch, and then again by Indonesian authorities, for his literary activities (Samuels 1999). This Earth of Mankind, perhaps Pramoedya’s most popular novel, was written (more accurately ‘recited’) during his fourteen-year imprisonment on Buru Island (Lane 1991). Pramoedya has won several writing awards (GoGwilt 1996: 149), and has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prise in literature (BBC News 2006). He ‘has long been recognised as Indonesia’s most significant literary voice’ (GoGwilt 2003: 217).
‘Rule of Law’ as Anti-Colonial Discourse: Taiwanese Liberal Nationalists’ Imagination of Nation and World under Japanese Colonialism
Authors: Chen Yun-Ru
Published: November 2024

Law is – and has long been – a crucial element of (post-) colonial orders. It is commonplace wisdom that the Western centre dominates the eastern periphery, not only through outright force but also via institutions and ideas. Europeans and Americans have a long history of bringing ‘civilisation,’ be it Christianity, ‘modernity’ or law, to peoples they perceive as less civilised. Despite the common practice of applying different rules to different peoples, colonisers often see the lack of uniformity of law in the colonies as a failure, if not a necessary evil, for the ‘uncivilised’ colonised native. For countries that narrowly escaped subjugation to Euro-American colonialism, such as China and Japan, the sentiment of the humiliation endured when being forced to ‘openup’ and adopt Western legal systems is still very much alive.
‘Tame Kākā’ Still? Māori Members and the Use of Māori Language in the New Zealand Houses of Representatives
Authors: Stephens Mamari
Published: November 2024

As the 21st century advances, the Māori language (te reo Māori) has remained the primary language of the marae ātea, the bounded space usually positioned in front of the meeting house of a marae complex (Te Puni Kōkiri 2008: 31). Important language components of the rituals of encounter carried out on the marae ātea are also used for similar ritualistic purposes in the Parliamentary debating chamber. These shared language components have been able to survive, in Parliament, throughout 142 years of Māori representation. In fact it appears that the language used in both types of spaces has enabled the formation of an important linguistic and performative framework that has fostered the survival of Māori collective memory as well as Māori political participation.
Legal Language and Theatrical Presence: Transforming a Legal Inquiry into Theatre in version 1.0’s Deeply Offensive And Utterly Untrue
Authors: Williams David A.
Published: November 2024

In late 2005, it was revealed that the Australian monopoly wheat exporter AWB Ltd had significantly breached Australian Government backed UN sanctions by paying A$290 million in bribes or ‘kickbacks’ to the Iraq Government.1 As the purpose of these sanctions was to prevent Saddam Hussein’s Government from gaining access to hard currency with which he might purchase or develop weapons, Australian media reportage regularly referred to AWB Ltd’s ‘kickback’ payments as the ‘wheat-for-weapons’ scandal. To investigate the scandal, the Australian Government established the Inquiry into Certain Australian Companies in Relation to the UN Oil-for-Food Programme (the Cole Inquiry). Presided over by Commissioner Terence Cole QC, the high-profile inquiry undertook a forensic investigation of the legally and ethically murky world of international wheat trade.
Ruth Herz Judge Playing Judge Ruth Herz: Reflections on the Performance of Judicial Authority
Authors: Moran Leslie J. , Skeggs Beverley , Herz Ruth
Published: November 2024

Between 2001 and 2005, ‘Judge Ruth Herz’ appeared in a popular German daytime reality television court show, Das Jugendgericht (The Youth Court). German reality television court shows, of which there are several (Machura 2009), draw heavily on a US format. A key dimension of this format, and central to its reality effect, is the use of real judges to perform the role of judge in the show (Christie 1999; Kleinhans and Morris 2004; Kohm, 2006; Lorenzo-Dus 2008). The best known US example is Judge Judy, in which the title role is performed by Judith Sheindlin, an ex-New York family court judge. The Youth Court follows this model.
Introduction: Law's Theatrical Presence + Contributions & Acknowledgements
Authors: Leiboff Marett , Nield Sophie
Published: November 2024

This special issue of Law Text Culture explores law through the lens of theatrical theory and reads theatre through the paradigm of law. This unique interaction between the disciplines of theatre studies and law has brought together an extraordinary array of scholars working at the interstices of these fields, and delivers, we hope, a fascinating range of perspectives that will serve as both introduction to, and illustration of, the richness of this disciplinary exchange.
Breathing Sense into Women’s Lives Shattered by War: Dah Theatre Belgrade
Authors: Simic Olivera
Published: November 2024

The various ethnic and religious groups and individuals who suffered enormously during ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia deal with the legacies of violence and human rights violations in a number of ways. As a human rights lawyer from this region, and someone who is scarred by the war, I have immersed myself in literature and art that explores armed conflict and its impact on women. After the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia, and since my arrival in Australia, I have been following closely the transitional justice processes in my homeland (such as trials and initiatives by local peace activists aimed at reconciliation) and have always been present — with my mind, heart and research — with peace activists from the former Yugoslavia in their struggle to address past atrocities. My particular experience affected my intellectual and spiritual being and has driven my academic work in the direction of the ongoing exploration of the causes and consequences of war in my homeland as well as the trauma, resilience and utmost courage of its people.
The codification of Western law & the poetics of disclosure
Authors: Weisberg R.
Published: November 2024

Speaking perceptively of the criminal procedure in The Brothers Karamazov, Edward Wasiolek points out that the "legal process is an obstacle to the facts ... [It] brings forth only technique, ambition and triviality." Wolfgang Holdheim, writing on the same subject, observes that the legal error at the end of that novel is indicative of the ambiguities inherent in modern literature's approach to reality. These critics have shown a sensitivity to a topic otherwise rarely treated: the use of the legal theme within the modern novel not merely for dramatic effect, but also for thematic, structural and formal purposes not explicitly stated by the writer.
Not asking the law question
Authors: Chenoweth J.
Published: November 2024

In Asking the Law Question Margaret Davies launches border raids on the "isolationist mentality" of the law which mystifies its own specificity and insists on the law's separateness from other forms of knowledge and practices. Davies' fascination with parameters, borders, boundaries and constraints manifests itself textually as a constant play of multiple insides and outsides. She confronts the law's exclusiveness by challenging its systematic exclusions, and she tests the limits of her own inclusion within the law by dispensing with its traditional distinction between what is appropriate in a legal textbook and what is not. Davies' border-crossings - her (parenthsized) lighthearted banter, her candid admissions, her stories, her eclectic sources, her minimal use of cases, her determination not to baffle and not to bore, her meticulous conceptual unpicking, and her endless questioning - distinguish her text from the legions of soporific law books which collect dust in law libraries. Here is a volume students might actually put down before they nod off. This is a pedagogical tour de force, considering Davies is cross-pollinating legal theory with post-structuralism and deconstruction, all of which are conceptually dense and complex fields.
Checkpoint (Blacktown) by Zanny Begg
Authors: Lai J.
Published: November 2024

Artist: Joy Lai Artwork: Checkpoint (Blacktown) by Zanny Begg for the [out of gallery] project, 2004
The trouble with pictures
Authors: Biber K. , San Roque M.
Published: November 2024

The trouble with pictures contributes to an emerging field that explores the myriad of relationships between law and visual culture. The last decade or so has seen the consolidation of ‘visual culture’ into a recognised field of interdisciplinary — even postdisciplinary — study, its permeable borders now enclosing law. When Douzinas and Nead published their collection Law and the Image they characterised what has been the traditional relationship of law and art in two analytically distinct ways: ‘law’s art, the ways in which political and legal systems have shaped, used and regulated images and art, and art’s law, the representation of law, justice and other legal themes in art’ (Douzinas & Nead 1999: 11). By taking as our theme the trouble with pictures, we have sought to include pieces that acknowledge these more conventional confrontations between image and law, but which also challenge the sometimes artificial separations between law and the visual. In this collection, we have broadened our field of vision to include not only art, but also photography, film, popular culture and news media imagery. We wanted to chart also the complicated, imbricated and interdependent relations between the legal, visual and aesthetic realms. We have included work that examines representations of law and legal events in visual forms, as well as articles that detail in specific ways some of law’s inadequate attempts to regulate or respond to the challenges of visual culture. There are articles and artworks that look at the role of the visual as evidence; of guilt, of ownership, of law, as well as speculations on the role of the visual as, or standing in for, law. Our aim, in this issue, is not to prescribe or delimit the kinds of trouble we had in mind, but to continue the dialogue between words and pictures, between pictures and pictures, between artists and scholars, between law and the visual — and we want that dialogue to continue beyond the covers of this journal.
When the artwork takes the pictures
Authors: Astore M.
Published: November 2024

I came to Australia on 26 December 1975 due to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon. The war erupted in our neighbourhood and a Christian militia began recruiting local boys, including my younger brother. Choosing not to take part in the violence, we rushed to the Australian Embassy to apply for a visa. Thankfully it was still open for business. We applied for an immigration visa and within 6 months flew to Melbourne to where my uncle lived. We arrived with the status of ‘migrants’ and not as ‘refugees’. A few weeks later the Australian Embassy in Beirut closed and relocated to Larnaca, Cyprus. In effect anyone in Lebanon who wanted to flee to Australia had to travel to another country like Cyprus in order to apply for an Australian visa. Relatives who decided to brave the war were subsequently turned into refugees in their own country. In 1988, when Israel continued its invasion of the south of Lebanon, air raids obliterated my father’s village Salhié1 sending those who survived and did not resist to flee to other villages. Being Christians, in 2000 they were scrutinised by Islamic forces who were credited by the Lebanese government with having successfully resisted and driven the Israelis out of Lebanon. In August 2001, I watched Middle Eastern refugees fleeing wars, being taken as prisoners by the Australian Army aboard the ship Tampa.
Breaking cycles of subjugation through bodily performance: lived experience inside legal processes at the Marikana Commission of Inquiry
Authors: Gill-Leslie Robyn
Published: November 2024

On 16th August 2012, the South African Police Service fired live ammunition into a crowd of striking mineworkers, killing 34 men and severely wounding others. Subsequently known as the Marikana massacre, the Marikana Commission of Inquiry was soon instituted to uncover the ‘truth’ about what had happened. This article suggests that such linear attempts at truth-finding excise bodily rhythms, resulting in a truth-finding exercise that risks redundancy and irrelevance for key stakeholders impacted by atrocity. Interrogating theoretical insights around corporeality, performance and rhythm to critique ideals of legal progress and aims of closure and truth exposition, this article uses encountered bodily performance as an analytical touchstone to reveal a parallel, cyclical rhythm inside the linear operation of the law. The article suggests that a prioritisation of such bodily performance – foregrounding the lived experience inside the law of truth-seeking – can make truth recovery more relevant to key stakeholders. Such bodily performance also demonstrates a pathway to breaking the cycle of bodily subjugation to positivist legal undertakings, by creating sensory bridges between key stakeholders inside the Marikana Commission of Inquiry.
Places Lived: An Ego-Histoiriste and Jurisographer Discuss Living with Law in Sydney
Authors: Docker John , Genovese Ann
Published: November 2024

The following essays, by John Docker and myself, were delivered on the final panel of the ‘Lives Lived with Law’ symposium, held at the Melbourne Law School in December 2014. The panel was called ‘Places Lived’, and our purpose was to reflect together on how intellectual traditions are inherited and inhabited in a place. The essays were written and presented as they are published here, commencing with this short introduction. We wanted to stage in public a long-standing personal discussion about what it might mean to write about Australia, in many forms and styles of address and how this involves, for us, self-fashioning a life through writing in Australia, and as Australians. In both instances, as will become evident in my essay, I have a debt to pay to John.
Jurisprudent of London: Arts of Association
Authors: McVeigh Shaun
Published: November 2024

This essay presents part of a study of the office and persona of the jurisprudent, and in particular, the jurisprudent of London (if such an office exists and if it is not in abeyance).1 Writing in the somewhat neglected traditions of office and training in the conducts of life, draws attention to the dignities, obligations, privileges and rights that are taken up by a jurisprudent when they enter into institutional and public life.
Targeted by Persuasion: Military Uniforms and the Legal Matter of Killing in War
Authors: Keshavarz Mahmoud , Parsa Amin
Published: November 2024

In this paper, we argue that the legitimation of killing in war is not simply formed by adherence to certain legal requirements that exist apart from and prior to war; instead, we suggest, the law of armed conflict in itself cannot but operate through admitting certain materials onto the battlefield as distinctively legal materials. Using the theory of legal materiality, we show that the military uniform is a legal material that makes the legal matter of legitimate targeting intelligible to law. This process happens through the ways in which the uniform shapes the possibility of visual recognition and differentiation in order to make certain bodies targetable and others not targetable. We refer to this visual recognition and differentiation as a domain of persuasion. We show that the historical, functional and visual attributes of the uniform, as a design artefact, produce a convincing domain of distinction for the attacking agent. Finally, we turn to insurgency, arguing that the legal matter of targeting is shaped not only by the presence, use and manipulation of this legal material but also by the absence of it.
Documents against ‘Knowledge’; immanence and transcendence and approaching legal materials
Authors: Leach James
Published: November 2024

In the wake of Ingold’s critique of ‘materiality’, one that highlights the cosmological assumptions about spirit and matter that the concept inscribes, I examine ‘material’ documents that record custom and indigenous knowledge on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea. Documents and books have a history there bound up with colonial governance and with missionisation, thus a strong connection with imposed ‘law’ in local understanding, yet the production and circulation of documents have also been a site of resistance to the imposition of outside forms of politics, law, and ‘knowledge’. Examining the documents they choose to make themselves makes us consider whether knowledge and law is something that exists ‘to be’ documented, or whether in fact, documentation (like initiation or gardening) may be where knowledge is ‘immanent’ (following Strathern’s recent formulation). Their documentation is ‘against’ knowledge in the image of a transcendental and universal commons, or a private possession. Focusing on their modes of making knowledge appear leads to a consideration of the performance of knowledge, the time and manner of its revelation and concealment, and of how different (cosmological) conceptions of ‘materials’ and process can be of interest in shaping a ‘legal materialist’ approach without a transcendent image of law.
A Rhetorical Matter of Life and Law: The Speculative Futures of (Bio)political Reproduction
Authors: Murray Stuart J.
Published: November 2024

This essay argues that the ‘materiality’ of life and law are today technological artefacts of a biopolitical project, and that sexual-reproductive and legislative boundaries are the boundaries around which power coheres and materializes—making life law’s matter, an effect that is slyly taken up as legal ‘cause’. I offer as case studies readings of two incommensurable texts: Milan Kundera’s political fiction, The Joke, and the contemporary fertility industry, an instantiation of biopolitical techno-science. Bringing into tension the ‘materiality’ of life and law across these two sites, I hope to surface some of the vernaculars of (bio)political power—rhetorical matters of historical, political, socioeconomic, and technological concern that nevertheless claim the objectivity of ‘matter’. Both texts also concern reproduction—sexual, artificial, cultural, political—and how it is used to promote a certain ideology of citizenship and to regulate political ‘freedoms’. While Kundera’s novel, written in the 1960s, represents a critique of ‘old’ materialism as the reproduction of Communist State power, here, in juxtaposition, Kundera’s fiction occasions my critique of (legal) ‘new’ materialism—as neoliberal and biopolitical investment in the speculative futures proffered by the fertility industry.
What if all we can see are the parts, and there is not a whole: elements and manifestations of the making of law of ‘climate justice’
Authors: Kang Hyo Yoon
Published: November 2024

This essay discusses the meaning of 'climate justice' and the ways in which it is or is not materialised currently in climate change litigation. First I present the immateriality of the abstract concepts that make up this composite term: 'climate' and 'justice'. Yet the placing the words adjacent to one another seems to mobilise them into a novel composite vehicle of legal action. I trace how the idea of 'climate justice' hovers as an elusive idea around the concrete particularities of what can be known about 'climate' specifically in relation to 'justice'. These questions are probed in the setting and context of the Philippine Human Rights Commission's 2018 Inquiry into the Carbon Majors' (Chevron, Exxon, Shell, BP etc.) violation of human rights.
The aim here is mainly diagnostic: rather than taking legal doctrines of environmental or international human rights law as analytical materials, I use a legal materialist approach in order to try to make sense of what is concretely happening when an issue of a planetary scale of complexity is addressed and represented in a medium-sized moot court room. It helps to bring into vision the specific modes by which formats, places and media are enlisted as constitutive elements in the becoming and stabilisation of the emerging legal matter of climate justice. My analysis depicts law acting as the medium for upscaling (an idea of human justice) and downscaling (of climate science) different knowledges into other frameworks of reality than their original ones: to that of the human narrative scale.
Law and Charity Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Georg Simmel, Franz Baermann Steiner
Authors: Mack M.
Published: November 2024

The concept of law and the associated figure of Moses have recently received much attention: last year alone two books about Moses were published.1 This recent interest bespeaks the necessity to reflect upon law for informed debates about theology in its relation to communal issues.2 Gillian Rose often warned against a perception of Judaism as 'pure' ethics without strong relations to both theology and politics.3 Jewish law is theological and political such that it cannot be separated form coercion as well as from love or charity. Its coercion, however, takes care of the specific of the singular: law as charity does not lord over the world, but asks to be questioned from different perspectives, asks to be applied in new forms from context to context.4 Law as charity aims to preserve the life of specific individuals, or groups of individuals: it protects persons rather than things.5 Rather than being like Roman law, identified with dominum (see Milbank 1990: 12), Jewish law is related to the actions and anxieties of specific people in specific circumstances, making use of coercion not for the sake of the interest of property but with the concern of keeping life as undamaged as possible.
The Fault of the Sacred
Authors: Dalton J.
Published: November 2024

What commits 'us' to think the sacred, and in so doing, perhaps form a bond of community in response to this fascinating name? To pose such a question is to ask, 'what makes possible the communication of the sacred'? In the same instant, it is to think what is at stake in this communication. Let us suggest at the outset, without caution and upon the pain of an exigency to compel speech to push beyond its rights, that if what is sacred gives itself from a place of separation, the sacred grants, or rather affirms, the passion of an unbounded speech that touches upon a Yes, a yes that traces the inacessible intimacy of sacrifice.
Desecration, Law and Evil
Authors: Gaete R.
Published: November 2024

The essential question about the Holocaust "How could this happen?... retains... all its weight, all its stark nakedness, all its horror" (Scholem, in Markle 1995: 149). It is essential because it gathers together all those events that are collectively known as the Holocaust. It expresses both disbelief and a secret hope that if only the horror could be understood it would be less terrifying. The failure to comprehend the organised extermination of a whole people has created a void in History, a hole in the meaningful narratives of History. Such a monstrous event recalls Kant's phrase in Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1960: 28): "There is evil". Kant was asserting the existence of substantive, positive evil against the dominant view that 'evil' is no more than a lack: either ignorance or psychological deficiency. Today, even more than in Kant's time, talk of evil may sound naive and as old-fashioned as talking about the sacred. In fact, both are often associated, for example, when talking about violence practised by fundamentalist movements or about Nazi "holy wildness" (Zimermann 1996: 252). One could speak of a 'perverted sacred' akin to that spiritual evil which Schelling called "a pale, bloodless, fanatical spiritualism that despises sensuality and is bent on violently dominating and exploiting it... a perversion of true spirituality" (Zizek 1996: 8).
After Serrano Ethics, Theology and the Law of Blasphemy
Authors: Casey M. , Fischer A. , Ramsay H.
Published: November 2024

In the latest academic apologia for the antics of bad boy photographer Andres Serrano, Damien Casey attempts to portray him as not only a great liberal artist, but as a great Christian theologian too. One suspects Serrano is laughing up his sleeve at the ease with which such 'postmodern' thinking can be grafted on to the support of his iconoclasm. Casey rehearses some of the standard liberal excuses -- though with no fresh argument -- and then settles down to some more novel points concerning theology, Scripture and society. We will give some treatment of his standard liberal case first, then turn to Casey's more original contributions, and finally comment on the current state of the law regarding this issue.
Equity, Conscience and the Art of Judgment as Ius Aequi et Boni
Authors: Drakopoulou M.
Published: November 2024

One morning in 1630, Henry Sherfield, barrister and recorder of the city of Salisbury, entered St. Edmund's Church and, with a pike-staff, smashed a painted window depicting God creating the universe. 1 For a man like Sherfield there was no discord of conscience with public duty, nor ultimately between conscience and the law. To him, his conscience and public life were interwoven without conflict between genuine moral convictions and external authority. Indeed, a year earlier, when speaking to a sessions jury, he had declared: "For no man can have true peace with God unless he shall profess to fear God and to make a good conscience the rule of his actions..." (Slack 1993:151). In his defence of the crime, Sherfield argued that the 'idol' had troubled him for over twenty years -- his being unable to enter the church without seeing it -- and that his display of private conscience in the public domain had been entirely appropriate (Cobbett 1809: 524). Yet lacking episcopal sanction or the support of secular law, his act of vandalism brought his downfall. Sherfield was prosecuted in the Star Chamber in 1633 and, with twenty-two privy councillors in attendance, stripped of his office, heavily fined and professionally destroyed; the trial bringing disgrace to the city and ruin to himself. He died, a debtor, the following year.
Postemotional Law
Authors: Mestrovic S. G.
Published: November 2024

How can one begin to make sense of the state of law in the present fin de millennium? Is law still on the trajectory of the socalled Enlightenment project? Is it a social institution which, in tandem with others, promotes progress, justice, and the triumph of reason over tradition and ignorance (see Gellner 1992)? Or, at the other extreme, has law also become postmodern? Such that, as truth becomes subjective, law becomes an empty gesture, reduced to a rootless, circulating fiction, along with other such fictions that are consumed by the nihilistic masses (see Rosenau 1992)? In this paper, I will argue for a middle characterization; one based on my book, Postemotional Society (1997), and that I call postemotional law.
Moving Beyond the Law of The Fathers Toni Morrison's Paradise
Authors: Slaughter M. M.
Published: November 2024

You don't have to know the work of the legal theorist, Pierre Legendre, to read Toni Morrison's new novel, Paradise (Morrison 1997) but it doesn't hurt. The novel is not ostensibly about law (as one might expect, in Paradise there is no crime). Nevertheless, law is central to the novel. It is what the paradisal community rests on, the foundation of the symbolic order. It lays down what would be taken to be the inalterable places of this society and culture. Law is constitutive, what constitutes, constitutional; which as we shall see is no fortuitous analogy. Paradise is a story of foundations, or foundational myths, at the center of which is law. With unusual uncanniness, these not-so-buried themes in Morrison's work overlap with Legendre's psychoanalytically based legal theories. If his work is an explication and explanation of the symbolic function of law -- what rests in society's legal unconscious -- Morrison's novel is an illustration of it. While the point of this paper is not to illustrate Legendre but to illuminate Morrison, awareness of Legendre makes corners and connections in Paradise brighter.
Black Letters and Black Rams: Fictionalizing Law and Legalizing Literature in Enlightenment England
Authors: Heinzelman S. S.
Published: November 2024

This spectacle of the promiscuous widow is described in a legal self-help book printed for women (and, in this case, by a woman). It was designed, claims its anonymous author, to inform the "fair Sex . . . how to preserve their Lands, Goods and most valuable Effects" (vii). Mixed in with this "serious matter" are anecdotes from customary law, provided by the author as "Things of Entertainment" (vi), of which this story of the widow-whore is one. In Patrick O'Brian's contemporary historical romance, The Mauritius Command, set in 1810 during the Napoleonic Wars, we find a re-enactment of the custom. In the novel Mr. Farquhar, a gentleman "bred to the law" (1977:72), who is en route to his position as Governor of Mauritius, newly "liberated" from French occupation by the English, asserts the superiority of English law over Buonaparte's "new French code." (164). It does not surprise the reader familiar with eighteenth century culture to discover that Mr. Farquhar has been led to reflect upon the difference between English and French law by "considerations on the inheritance of landed property" (164). For him, the law's wisdom lies in the way in which it protects property from illicit dissemination; or, put another way, the law's effects are most precisely realized in its capacity to distribute man's property, including women's bodies and their products, in an orderly and predictable fashion.
Rhetoric and Somatics: Training the Body to do the Work of Law
Authors: Goodrich P.
Published: November 2024

In a passage of the Lawiers Logike that is ostensibly concerned with the rhetorical figures of description, Abraham Fraunce surprisingly defines "chronographia," the description of time, by reference to its antithesis. Citing "Master Lambard", Fraunce gives the following example: "an arrest is a certain restraint of a man's person, depriving it of his own will and liberty, and binding it to become obedient to the will of the law; and it may be called the beginning of imprisonment."1 (1588a: 64r) Stasis or arrestation of the body is here used ironically to exemplify interruption of the essentially incorporeal passage of time. Spatial confinement is used to signify a certain displacement or self-consciousness of temporality. Similarly inverting the usual order of disciplines, Fraunce uses law to exemplify rhetoric: a legal definition is used to illustrate what Renaissance rhetoricians variously term a "sensable figure" (Puttenham 1589: 136, 148) or "figure of amplification." (Peacham 1593: R iv b) In Fraunce's own Ramist lexicon, the figure of description is termed "an imperfect definition" and, again using a legal example of the general category of figure or scheme, he cites the maxim "the common law is common use." (Fraunce 1588a: 64)
Semantic Ecology and Lexical Violence: Nature at the Limits of Law
Authors: Delaney D.
Published: November 2024

This essay addresses two related questions. Each asks, in different ways, to what extent might we know law by the company that it doesn't keep? The first, given the theme of this special issue, concerns the comparative underdevelopment of interdisciplinary work involving legal scholarship and (critical) human geography. The second, raised, in part, in response to the first, concerns a more fundamental tendency in legal thought and practice to constitute the domain of the legal in opposition to physicality. Clearly, theoretical stipulations of the domain of the specifically legal have frequently been founded on its asserted contrasts with, say, politics, morality or society. Often, to theorize the legal is to draw boundaries around it, to mark its limits, to distinguish the interior of law from the extra-legal. (Davies 1996) To undertake this sort of operation is to create a conceptual or analytical distance between 'law, properly speaking,' and its mere contexts, or the ground against which law emerges as a figure. As critical scholars long ago demonstrated and now simply assume, the hows and whys of these moves may tell us a great deal about law as putative object of inquiry and about jurisprudence as internal border patrol and supervisor of legal identity. (Hutchinson 1988; Kerruish 1991) In many ways, then, we may know law most intimately by what it renounces, repudiates, ignores or denies.
Scarlett O'Hara as Feminist: The Contradictory, Normalizing Force of Law and Culture
Authors: Spanbauer J. M.
Published: November 2024

Many women, particularly feminists, find Scarlett O'Hara, from Gone with the Wind 2 (Mitchell 1936), at best irritating, and at worst, despicable: a character who embodies all of the negative stereotypes attributed to women throughout history. She is narcissistic, shallow, dishonest, manipulative, amoral, and completely lacking in any capacity for self-reflection and for analysis of the emotional and psychological responses of others. In fact, even Margaret Mitchell, who did not much care for the character she had created, often made "disparaging remarks about Scarlett" (Jones 1981: 333) and "claimed that she set out to write about Melanie as the protagonist and that Scarlett just took over the story." (Jones 1999: 35)
Admitting the Stranger: The Rule of Law, the Ethics of Medical Hospitality and the Borders of Governmental Imagination in Nineteenth Century France
Authors: Schafer S.
Published: November 2024

This essay takes as its point of departure a pair of perennial questions in western ethics: How might we know "the stranger"? What dictates proper behavior toward him or her? (Ogletree 1985) These ethical questions are also essential questions of culture, economics, law and diplomacy. They have inspired empathetic philosophical reflections, most notably in the work of Emmanuel Levinas (1969, 1998), theoretical work on difference, language, and subjectivity (Derrida 1998; Kristeva 1988), and literary explorations of human difference and alienation, most famously in Camus's The Stranger. ([1946] 1988; see also Stamelman on Jabes 1993) In Europe and North America, the treatment of the stranger who seeks refuge from political, cultural or sexual violence has surely been one of the signal ethical issues in immigration policy and foreign relations of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. (Sassen 1999: 98-158)
Past the Last Post? Time, Causation and Treaty Claims History
Authors: Byrnes G.
Published: November 2024

In a recent article, historian Peter Gibbons suggested that ‘[p]erhaps historical writings dealing with cultural matters that do not take postcolonial perspectives and problematize the presence of Pakeha run the risk of being considered as parts of the colonizing process’ (2002: 15). While Gibbons’ attention was focused on the texts produced by Pakeha cultural nationalists (versifiers, ethnologists, botanists and the like), his argument is applicable to other kinds of texts, such as the published historical narratives produced by the Waitangi Tribunal. For the past quarter century, the modern New Zealand Treaty claims process has provided Maori with a forum for the recognition of and restitution for numerous historical injustices. The process has been successful for some, yet painstakingly slow for others. This present-minded exhumation of the past has also witnessed the emergence of a new form of public history and genre of history-writing — Tribunal history. Yet this type of history is distinguished from other forms of history-writing by its strong postcolonial tendencies and highly present-minded approach toward the past.
Invaders, Illegals and Aliens: Imagining Exclusion in a ‘White Australia’
Authors: Elder C.
Published: November 2024

In the run up to the 2001 Australian Federal election John Howard launched his campaign with the pulpit thumping, vote winning cry of: ‘We will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come’ (28 October 2001). One hundred years earlier Australian federal parliamentarians had debated the form of the Immigration Restriction Act. One aspect of their discussion went: Mauger: … [the Australian people] are determined that Australia shall be kept free from alien invasion and contamination. Glynn: It is a question of colour, it is not a question of whether a man is an alien or not. Mauger: It is a question of coloured labour. Watson: … the question is whether we would desire that our sisters or our brothers should be married into any of these races to which we object (Cth of Aust 1901a: 4631–3).
The Mother Country and Her Colonial Progeny
Authors: Falconer L.
Published: November 2024

The ideological space created by the British Empire provided opportunities for explorations into the meanings of Victorian femininity. Woman could be the intrepid missionary, bringing light to dark Africa; the memsahib creating conflict in the colonies with her petty jealousies; or a vulnerable piece of her husband’s property to be defended from the ‘other’. She could also be the heroic mother responsible for the preservation of the race, or, simply an object of intensifying legal control over her reproductive capacities.