bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, volume 25
Authors: Mulcahy Sean , Leiboff Marett
Published: November 2024

This special issue of Law Text Culture, ‘Performing Theatrical Jurisprudence’, seeks to generate new accounts and explanations of law and legal thinking through the new field of theatrical jurisprudence. It invites a reflection on what theatrical jurisprudence can do for law and what law can do for performance.
Antigones of contemporary theatre: capturing problems of today’s civil disobedience in a theatre play
Authors: Gozdecka Dorota Anna
Published: November 2024

Despite its ancient origin Sophocles’ Antigone has proven to be timeless and provided continued inspiration for legal scholars, theatre practitioners and theorists alike. In this article I reflect on how the figure of Antigone continues to inspire contemporary play writing preoccupied with the intersections of law and theatre. The article analyses the play of my authorship, ‘Trumpsformation’ using the notion of ‘contemporary Antigones’. I argue that while Antigone has been often seen as a specific type of a female character, sometimes even a disturbed one, in my understanding a variety of characters can take on a role of an Antigone. This is possible, because Antigone’s political power lies in her role as a dissident who challenges injustices perpetuated in the name of the law. In this article I show how the presence of the figure of a contemporary Antigone and the use of an Antigonean conflict can be incorporated in the process of staging contemporary stories about injustice, law and the ethical duty in the times of conflict over the shape of political community.
Theatricalising Law in Three, 1929-1939 (Brisbane)
Authors: Leiboff Marett
Published: November 2024

I begin this article with a manoeuvre that presages three stories of lives lived with law. But because they speak of law past, there is a temptation to read them as curiosities, when their purpose – the thing I ask of them – is to disorient and challenge, to prompt and trigger the questions: ‘what do I bring to law, what do I miss because I am me, and what do I see because I am me?’ So rather than an exercise in law past, my purpose is to use those stories of law past to trigger something in us, as legal interpreters, now, as an ‘exercise in revolt … against oneself ’. I want the stories to challenge our own lives by asking – ‘what could I know in law through the life of someone in law other than me’.
time to write (for Larry) [poem]
Authors: Te Punga Somerville Alice
Published: November 2024

i need ten minutes to write this poem you need a couple of hours to work on your story between incoming calls and outgoing flights the best i can do is steal time from somewhere else: although you’ll read a pristine email version of this poem there’s curry from singh’s on the page of this handwritten draft. there’s no time to write, my friend.
Sex Trafficking and Global Governance in the Context of Pacific Mobility
Authors: Merry Sally Engle
Published: November 2024

The Pacific has long been home to mobile populations, from the early voyaging Polynesians to Asian immigrants to Europeans, Americans and Australians. In the latter group, some came as derelicts off ships and others as missionaries, traders, and owners of plantations and shipping. Movement was both within islands and between islands and mainlands. They were always connected by routes of trade and travel, but who travelled and what happened to them depended a lot on the particular legal and social conditions of travel and arrival.
‘The beauty…is that it speaks for itself’: geospatial materials as evidentiary matters
Authors: Clarke Kamari Maxine , Kendall Sara
Published: November 2024

This essay takes up the incorporation of geospatial materials into international criminal law and its institutional locations, focusing on the Hague-based International Criminal Court (ICC). We consider how geospatial materials such as satellite imagery are conscripted as legal materials for international criminal trials, and how these relatively novel forms of evidence require interventions of technical knowledge through expert witness testimony. The assemblage of satellite imagery, expert testimony, and submitted reports are subjected to what we call ‘juridical mediation’ – the vetting of materials through interpretive processes that bring them into a relationship with textual forms, such as statutory principles and the Rules of Procedure and Evidence. What appears on the other side of this mediated process is a complex and composite relationship between textual, technological, and hermeneutic forms, troubling the claim that geospatial material ‘speaks for itself’.
Prefaces and Authorship in International Law. The Example of Vitoria’s De Indis
Authors: Werner Wouter
Published: November 2024

In this article, I study the role of prefatory texts in international law. Based on Gerard Genette’s analysis of paratexts, I examine how prefaces shape the expectations of the reader through indications of genre, method and authorship. The first section introduces the notion of ‘paratext’ and provides some illustrations in treaties and documents of the International Court of Justice. The second section focuses specifically on a work that has broadly been regarded as foundational for the discipline of international law: Vitoria’s De Indis Et De Iure Belli. Through its analysis of paratext, this article provides a new lens on textual products and the creation of authorship in international law.
The Law is Not a Thing: Kafkan (Im)materialism and Imitation Jam
Authors: Martel James R.
Published: November 2024

In this article, I look at the question of how the law continually refounds itself in relationship to the material world by borrowing from that materiality a sense of its own tangibility (which it otherwise does not have) even as it in turn draws material orbits into its object lending them a certain sense of power and nobility (which they otherwise do not have either). This exchange suggests an unexpected vulnerability for the law insofar as it needs the material world to exist at all while the material world does not require an association with the law per se (and arguably is worse off in terms of the exchange it engages with the law insofar as it becomes complicit, at least by association, with law and it various forms of violence). To demonstrate a bit of that vulnerability I look at a US supreme course case 62 Cases of Jam v. United States in order to show how, when pressed to specify what an object is--in this case the question is of what constitutes jam vs. "imitation jam"--the law falters. Because it needs the material world to exist at all, the law is put into an uncomfortable position when it has to, as it were, get behind that materiality and specify what it is and what it consists of. While normally this discomfort is covered over by the performance of legal majesty and authority, occasionally, in situations like the case in question, we can see small indications emerging of the law's dilemma.
An Introduction to the Study of Law and the Sacred
Authors: Gearey A.
Published: November 2024

Law and the Sacred might appear as another one of the couplings that have characterised contemporary legal scholarship. Although it is too soon to say if this coupling represents a new departure, it can at least be distinguished by its passion; by its working through of the sense in which secular, western, law has failed to shake its constitution in the pre-modern. Scholarship in this field locates itself in a movement away from the domination of legal theory by a scientising social theory, or a positivisation of knowledge that rejects the mystery and the beyond in its own self-definition and auto-production. This collection attempts to follow a direction suggested by John Milbank: the relaxation of the pressure of the sacred has not filled the only available space with the steam of the "purely human" (1995: 2). A second characteristic of this scholarship is its critical edge: it could be said that it is provoked by a sense of dis-ease; an awareness that law's claims to order and empire ring hollow. In their various ways, the contributors to this volume are impatient with the claim that the triumph of scientific reason is the only means of describing the social world and the role of law. The essays collected here do not seek to give a definition of the sacred, they merely offer some orientation. Addressing the construction of particular paradigms of philosophy, legal history, theology or sociology, they share a concern with alternative ways of reading, with provocative recoveries of rival traditions. If this suggests an orientation to Critical Legal Studies, it is perhaps more to this movement's 'second wave', with its borrowings from continental philosophy and 'postmodern' theory. A reading of the sacred roots of law suggests a perspective on constructions of the contemporary secular legal order that never properly emerged in the first wave of critical legal thought; a perspective that might prove central to future developments in the field of legal theory.
Competing Notions of Law in American Civil Religion
Authors: Davis D. H.
Published: November 2024

The presence of a civil religion in America is now widely accepted. While its specific content is still debated, most agree that civil religion is essentially about those public rituals and myths that express for most Americans the nexus of the political order to the divine reality. According to Robert Bellah, who stimulated much of the discussion about civil religion with his seminal essay in 1967, civil religion in America is "an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality."
Levinas's Modern Sacred
Authors: Smith N. H.
Published: November 2024

Two concerns pervade Levinas's writings. The first is to persuade us that the basic ideas of monotheistic religion -- God, the transcendent, the infinite, and the holy -- are indispensible for understanding human subjectivity. The second is to rid these religious ideas of all metaphysical and theological impurity. One of the major sources of this impurity, in Levinas's view, is the traditional idea of the sacred. Levinas typically writes as if the very idea of the sacred were one of the chief obstacles to a proper understanding of religion. He denounces the sacred as "the essence of idolatry" (1990a: 14), as the "brother of sorcery" and "the half light" in which sorcery flourishes (1990b: 141). At other times, however, Levinas speaks of the sacred more positively, suggesting a contrast between a 'false', idolatrous sacred, and a 'true' sacred, one that expresses the authentic meaning of religion (1990a: 159, 1990b: 159). While it is true that Levinas is reluctant about using the word 'sacred' at all -- he prefers the expression "the holy" -- it makes sense to read him as rejecting not the concept of the sacred as such, but a particular metaphysical conception of it. That is to say, Levinas's reflections on the meaning of the basic concepts of monothesitic religion can be understood as a new way of thinking about the sacred, a way fitting for a modern, disenchanted, post-metaphysical age.
Cruel and Unusual: Parsing the Meaning of Punishment
Authors: Dyan J.
Published: November 2024

If Foucault's metropolitan world of public torture--"the great spectacle of physical punishment,"--died out by the beginning of the nineteenth century, the punitive spectacle and its requisite bodies were resurrected in the colonies. Given the lack of precedents in English law, the speed with which the institution of slavery took shape in the United States and the severity of the laws that effected it are exceptional. Although strategies of divestment were already present in the rights of property and privilege at common law, and later tied to the definition of property in persons; black slaves, regarded as outside the social order, gave new genetic capital to the principles of tainted blood, bondage, and servility.
Friendship, Tradition, Democracy: Two Readings of Aristotle
Authors: Thurschwell A.
Published: November 2024

In a short speech published in 1988 entitled "The Politics of Friendship," Jacques Derrida concluded with a distinction between two models of friendship, exemplified by Aristotle and Cicero on one hand and Montaigne on the other, and suggested that these two models lead toward different notions of politics: The Greco-Roman model [of friendship] appears to be marked by the value of reciprocity, by a homological, immanentist, finitist, and politicist concord. Montaigne (whom we are reading here as the example of a paradigm) doubtless inherits the majority of these traits. But he breaks the reciprocity therein and discreetly introduces, so it seems to me, heterology, asymmetry, and infinity . . . . Shall one say that this fracture is Judaeo-Christian? Shall one say that it depoliticizes the Greek model or that it displaces the nature of the political? (Derrida 1988: 643-4) Thus, if hesitantly and only in the form of a rhetorical question, Derrida seemed to oppose the Greek model of love between finite men with another model, foreign to the humanism of the Greeks: the Judaeo-Christian model of love of an infinite God.
Interdisciplinarity as Reading: Truth Commission Journal and Notes
Authors: Sanders M.
Published: November 2024

August 5, 1998: The Truth and Reconciliation Commission is holding an amnesty hearing at the Central Methodist Church in Johannesburg. The hearing is a continuation of one held in May, concerning the events now remembered as the Shell House incident.2 In March 1994, security guards from the African National Congress headquarters at Shell House, an office building in the middle of Johannesburg, fired their guns at a large contingent of Zulu marchers, some armed with "traditional weapons": cow-hide shields, sticks, clubs, spears.3 Eight marchers died, and the guards have applied for amnesty. A witness, one of the marchers, is being quizzed on what happened. Mr. Mhlaba, in dark trousers and a bright blue team jacket, wearing glasses with a gold trim, is being questioned as to the meaning of the chant amandla! ngawethu! uSuthu! uSuthu!, which he is asked to utter, with accompanying gestures, before the members of the Amnesty Committee. Since official record-keeping is in the form of a transcript, the Chairman, Justice Hassen Mall, must summarize what he has witnessed: let it be noted that the witness chanted with raised fist, taking two steps forward and then one step back for each chant. The fist will have held a stick or a spear: ubhoko, umkhonto. The lawyer cross-examining Mhlaba on behalf of the guards has several questions in this regard. Isn't this a war chant? No, it is not a war chant; as he has said, it is the praise uttered, according to tradition, when you are going to see a king or a chief; the word uSuthu is part of the name Mangosuthu. The chant amandla! ngawethu! comes from Zulu tradition. It means power - to us. The lawyer, who professes to know nothing about Zulu culture or tradition, insists: isn't uSuthu! a cry of warriors going into battle? Mhlaba tries another tack: I have never heard of warriors going into war chanting. When you go into war you do not make a noise. If you make a noise, the enemy will know where you are coming from. The lawyer returns several times to the same line of questioning, as if to confirm a prearranged passage of reasoning: Zulu therefore warrior therefore killer therefore ANC guards acted in self-defense. The right cultural explanation will be his first premise. As "native informant," Mhlaba has only to provide it in order to vindicate the guards and implicate himself. I sit in a cold pew, earphones on, hearing both Mhlaba's testimony, which is in Zulu, and the simultaneous translation into English. There are a few others in the church, mostly black, most also wearing earphones. Also sitting there are two black policemen, who, in spite of their regulation blue caps and jackets, are visibly cold. It is a relief afterwards to reemerge into the warm winter sunlight.
Archive Box - Series One: Matters in relation to Aborigines Act (1886)
Authors: Birch T.
Published: November 2024

24 May 1930 The Board for the Protection of the Aborigines reports that for the month ending April 1930 no additional expenditure was outlaid by the Board with the exception of the purchase of 100 yards of superior fencing wire. The ration inventory for the natives and half castes recognised within the relevant clauses of the Act (1886) did not exceed previously stated amounts allocated and attended to within that Act (1886).
Imperial Legacies (Post)Colonial Identities: Law, Space and the Making of Stanley Park, 1859-2001
Authors: Mawani R.
Published: November 2024

Stanley Park is the third largest urban park in North America. Located in downtown Vancouver, British Columbia (BC), the 960-acre park was opened by civic authorities in 1888, only two years after the city was incorporated. From early on, Stanley Park became a popular leisure space for Vancouver’s ‘citizens’ and visitors alike. Today, as one of the most frequented tourist destinations in BC, the park remains an important attraction, offering a variety of year round recreational opportunities and drawing approximately 8 million visitors annually (Grant & Dickson 2003, Steele 1985, 1993). Importantly, Stanley Park also occupies a significant geographic and symbolic space in Vancouver’s imaginary. Often described as ‘the foremost symbol of Canada’s most beautiful city’ (Steele 1985: 7), the park is celebrated in Imperial Legacies (Post)Colonial Identities tourist books, brochures, and on visitor websites as a ‘virgin forest’ that reflects a uniquely ‘natural west coast atmosphere,’ including an array of plants, wildlife and ancient trees.
Mediating Punishment? Prisoners’ Songs as Relational ‘Problem-Solving’ Devices
Authors: Crockett Thomas Phil , Collinson Scott Jo , McNeill Fergus , Escobar Oliver , Cathcart Frödén Lucy , Urie Alison
Published: November 2024

In this article we share some findings from the Distant Voices – Coming Home project. It is a partnership between the Universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh and the West of Scotland, and the Glasgow-based arts charity Vox Liminis. Distant Voices aims to explore and practice re/integration after punishment through creative collaborations (primarily songwriting) and action-research. The project is complex and interdisciplinary, blurring boundaries between creative practices, community-building, research, knowledge exchange and public engagement. As such, this article does not present a synthesis of project findings, but instead discusses original music created within the project, proposing that an analysis of the ‘musical event’ (DeNora 2003) of the songwriting can tell us about punishment and re/integration.
Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, volume 24
Authors: Parker James , Ramshaw Sara , San Roque Mehera
Published: November 2024

This essay introduces a large and diverse special issue on ‘The Acoustics of Justice: Law, Listening, Sound’. Until recently the acoustic dimensions of law and justice were not a major concern in the academy, either in self-consciously legal scholarship, or elsewhere. Things are changing, as indeed the size of this collection suggests. And our hope is that the work gathered here will go some way to addressing this deficit. Nevertheless, this introduction does not attempt to theorise how. Though the collection was conceived in 2019, it was mostly produced since the arrival of COVID-19. And we are tired. We have been working from home too long; or rather our homes have been ‘requisitioned’ for work. Our teaching loads have increased and the teaching itself rapidly onlined. All while separated from loved ones and attempting to school or otherwise entertain our kids at home. And we are the lucky ones. This introduction is, in a sense, an anti-introduction, or a non-introduction then: a strategic withdrawal of labour that opens the door onto the collection but offers little in the way of guidance to readers once they step through. Whether that is generous or irresponsible we leave to readers to decide.
Law with the Sound of Its Own Making
Authors: Mandic Danilo
Published: November 2024

This paper makes use of Robert Morris’s Box with the Sound of Its Own Making (1961) as an analogy and a structural device to put forward an understanding of law as a sonic artefact. Similar to this sculpture, or sound of sculpture for that matter, it proposes that law, a statue-like formation, is constituted by its own ever-lasting sounding that continuously shapes the spatial and temporal field in which it reverberates and encloses subjects and objects. By resisting law’s tendency to instrumentalise and objectify sound, the paper argues that such sonic quality cannot be reduced to law’s own pronouncements and vocalisations only. Instead, it traces the sonic beyond that which is audible to law or what an ear can hear. By drawing on the work of the French philosopher Michel Serres it demonstrates the relational qualities of sound, noise, and hearing as intrinsic qualities to the body and functioning of law. Approaching sound and its relation to law in this way not only brings forward questions about the ontological bearings of law, but it also allows to sound out novel epistemological passages for hearing, understanding, and thinking about law.
What I Heard About Manus Island (When I Listened to 14 Hours of Recordings from Manus Island)
Authors: Dao André
Published: November 2024

This essay stages a hearing of the first seven recordings (the first 70 minutes, or the first week) of how are you today, an artwork produced by six men detained by the Australian Government on Manus Island, and three collaborators based in Melbourne (together, the Manus Recording Project Collective). In this staging, conducted by one of the Melbourne based collaborators, ‘hearing’ shifts between the sonic and the metaphoric, and between the ear and the mind. The hearing is concerned with the question: what is the nature of the relation between the hearer and the one whose hearing is heard?
Making Sense of Minor Jurisprudence
Authors: Antaki Mark
Published: November 2024

This essay attempts to understand ‘Minor Jurisprudence’, to articulate some of its senses and resonances. It does so, first, by looking into the emergence of ‘Minor Jurisprudence’ out of the ‘Law As…’ symposia, particularly Christopher Tomlins’ reflections thereon. It does so, second, by looking into ‘Minor Jurisprudence’ as a modification of the ‘minor literature’ Deleuze and Guattari coin or borrow from Kafka in their reading of him. There are underexplored resonances between some of the language and thinking tied to the emergence of ‘Minor Jurisprudence’ out of the ‘Law As…’ symposia and the language and thinking of Deleuze and Guattari. Indeed, when one looks into Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘minor literature’, one even finds a ‘minor jurisprudence’, one that merits attention as ‘Law As…’ grows up into ‘Minor Jurisprudence’.
Contents, Contributions and Introduction, LTC, volume 21
Authors: Tomlins Christoper
Published: November 2024

This collection of essays for Law Text Culture represents an extended critical examination of ‘minor jurisprudence’, a concept that made its appearance in the 1990s but which has since lain largely fallow. In 2016, ‘minor jurisprudence’ was chosen as the subject for the fourth ‘Law As …’ symposium, held at the School of Law, University of California, Berkeley. Over two days in December eleven invited participants – ranging from the 1990s originators of the concept to current early career scholars – presented work that attempted to define, defend, utilize and/or criticize the concept. Those papers, fully revised, are presented here. Collectively, they represent the fullest and most complete examination of the interesting and potentially productive idea of minor jurisprudence ever undertaken.
Legislating away Indigenous Rights
Authors: Howard-Wagner D.
Published: November 2024

In January 1998, after two years of implementing the Howard government’s agenda in relation to various national and highly controversial issues, such as the granting of consent under the then World Heritage Properties Conservation Act 1984 (Cth) for the development of Hinchinbrook marina and resort, I was promoted to a senior policy position within the Office of Indigenous Affairs. This was the branch of the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet responsible for advising the Prime Minister and Cabinet on Indigenous affairs. It was a particularly contentious period for Indigenous affairs. The Office of Indigenous Affairs was conducting a review of policy development functions, and administration of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission (ATSIC); drafting the Native Title Amendment Bill 1998 in response to the High Court Wik decision; drafting the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Bill 1998 in response to the Hindmarsh Island Bridge affair; and managing matters relating to the Howard government’s decision to approve the construction of a uranium mine at Jabiluka within the World Heritage-listed Kakadu National Park. It also housed the Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation. I was assigned to a small legal policy team responsible for the preparation of the Aboriginal and Torres Islander Heritage Protection Bill 1998 that would repeal and replace the existing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Act 1984 (Cth). Our small team of three people was responsible for working with the Office of Parliamentary Counsel within the federal Attorney-General’s Department in preparing the clauses and content of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Heritage Protection Bill (‘the Bill’) and the Explanatory Memorandum. We were also charged with responsibility for liaising with the states and territories about specific sections of the Bill. The team prepared all parliamentary speeches, includingthe second reading speech that introduced the Bill into Parliament. While we were responsible for these tasks, we received our directions from the Prime Minister and Cabinet, including specific details about the objectives and intent of the legislation. Official and confidential Cabinet documents detailed this information. At the direction of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, bureaucrats designed the Bill to take a broader focus than simply Indigenous heritage protection. The Bill focused on balancing competing interests.
Law, play and the self in Aristotle and Vivès
Authors: FitzGerald M.
Published: November 2024

I wish to bring to the question of the legal subject an interpretative structure, which I imagine as follows: at the centre of this structure is a ‘violent concussion of the substance of the brain’. It emanates along the radius of the ‘optic nerves’, engorging the ducts of the eyes with ‘lachrymal humidities’; and its repercussions are communicated to the entire muscular envelope of the diaphragm. At the surface of this structure are tears of laughter, which are the index not of the equivalence of these affects, but of an ambivalence whose profile is articulated in a very specific polarity: these tears of laughter resemble ‘Democritus heraclitising and Heraclitus democritising’.
Detention and the dwelling: Lévinas and the refuge of the asylum seeker
Authors: Loughnan C.
Published: November 2024

The Australian government introduced mandatory immigration detention in 1992 as a means of deterring ‘unauthorised arrivals’ from coming to these shores and it has since been supported and extended by successive federal governments. Whilst immigration detention only forms one component of Australia’s Migration Act 1958 (Cth), it has attracted widespread attention in recent years as the federal government has turned increasingly towards modifications in the Act, arguably as a means of augmenting its capacity to exercise punitive control. Such modifications, aside from the introduction of mandatory detention, have included the introduction of offshore processing, whereby asylum seekers are dispatched to detention in remote locations whilst their claims are assessed. These are located on the island republic of Nauru, approximately 4000 kilometres from eastern Australia, and a naval base on Manus Island, an outpost of Papua New Guinea. Removing them physically from Australian territory minimises their access to community and legal support, and presumably acts as a warning to asylum seekers that any attempt to land on Australian soil without going through the proper channels is precarious. The offshore processing of claims, known as ‘The Pacific Solution’, is all the more distressing given the isolation of these locations, the lack of support and other resources at hand, and the often inhospitable landscape and climate. (Nauru, for example, after many years of intensive phosphate mining, resembles a barren lunar wasteland.) A number of detention centres on Australian soil were initially set up in similarly remote locations, mainly in the desert, where detainees have often spent years awaiting the processing of their claims, many miles from towns and communities, surrounded by dry, flat, landscapes.
Law, metaphysics, and the new iconoclasm
Authors: Sherwin R. K.
Published: November 2024

We have been told many times since the dawn of the modern era that we are living in a post-metaphysical age. As Gianni Vattimo (2003a) recently put it, we are all on our way to becoming ‘accomplished nihilists.’ When Vattimo uses the word ‘nihilist’, he has in mind Nietzsche’s sense of the term: meaning, roughly, that what we call ‘truth’ is akin to a mobile army of metaphors. In Vattimo’s view, and in the view of many social constructivists (for example Berger and Luckmann 1966), the positivist model of scientific knowledge has increasingly given way to Nietzsche’s model of rhetoric.
The Corporate Monster Metaphor
Authors: Crofts Penny
Published: November 2024

The metaphor of corporations as monsters is a feature of academic and judicial writings. Like monsters, corporations are creatures of fiction that problematize and challenge order. Corporations do not fit neatly into common law criminal legal doctrine, which was conceived and structured around the classic legal subject, that is, the individual human being. Corporations are amoral immortals, which ‘have no conscience and feel no pain’. They have superhuman strength, growing exponentially in size and wealth in accordance with the dictates of capitalism, and are capable of doing great harms and evil. Like monsters, corporations are contaminated and contaminating; in the process of becoming legal subjects corporations have become dehumanised and dehumanising. Despite the dominance of the corporate monster metaphor, there is slippage around the conception of which type of monster best represents corporations, and this slippage has implications for how the law regards and regulates (or not) corporations. This article takes the metaphor of the corporation as monster seriously. Descriptively, this analysis asks us to think more specifically about the different metaphorical implications of different kinds of monsters. Normatively, the argument considers the implications of these distinctive framings for criminal legal understandings of the corporation. Calling corporations monsters places us within the horror genre. We therefore need to read and understand these metaphors within that genre. A central insight of the horror genre is that monsters justify and require extreme responses. Rather than stopping at the argument that corporations have no body to kick, we need to find more imaginative and specific responses to corporate crime.
Theory, Politics and the Reform of Corporations Law (or Corporations Law as a Glob)
Authors: Wishart D.
Published: November 2024

Corporations law sits on the intersection of many larger forces in society -- labour and capital, market and organisation, global and local, public and private, and so forth. In the mediation between these, corporations law can play a large part, as between market and organisation, or a small part, as between global and local. Even were you not to believe in forces writ large (pace Ireland 2002), corporations law is that environment of business relationships which in part constructs the power people exercise. Collective entrepreneurial activity is defined by corporations law, power being exercised through the acceptance of such risk-taking as both accommodating and constructing the future. The ideas which imbue corporations law therefore resonate throughout society.
Reconsidering 'Globalisation': Judicial Reform in the Philippines
Authors: Hunter R.
Published: November 2024

Various commentators have identified the development of 'globalised' law--Western and neo-liberal in origin--produced by global economic imperatives, and particularly under the demands of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank. For example, David Trubek et al note that 'Legal fields have become important assets in the global competition for investment', and that the particular legal configurations perceived as necessary for successful competition include '"modern" laws, "efficient" courts, and "business oriented" legal professions' (Trubek et al 1994: 477). Boaventura de Sousa Santos observes the hierarchy of legal systems being reproduced in 'the successful globalization of a given [i.e. Western] localism' (Santos 1995: 263). And Peter Fitzpatrick critiques the loan conditions imposed by the IMF and the World Bank, derived from the Western nations that donate funds rather than the 'developing' nations that receive them, which all ultimately promote a neo-liberal agenda involving the supremacy of the free market and a limited role for the nation state (Fitzpatrick 2001: 213). In addition to explicit economic prescriptions of liberalisation, deregulation and privatisation, these loan conditions include political prescriptions of democracy, human rights and the rule of law. In particular, Fitzpatrick remarks upon the 'immense material commitment ... to promoting the rule of law and the "transplanting" or "reception" of occidental laws, especially those of a commercial variety' (Fitzpatrick 2001:214).
Beyond the Bounds
Authors: Mohr Richard
Published: November 2024

The contributions to this edition of Law Text Culture arose from a series of workshops and seminars which Luke McNamara and I organised through the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of Wollongong during 2001 and 2002. Having recently formed a research group focusing on the social and disciplinary intersections of law, we set out to explore these intersections with the help of colleagues working in law, humanities and social sciences in Australia, North America and Europe. Some of their contributions to this exploration are collected here. In the last edition of Law Text Culture (5.2), David Delaney wrote that a generation of assaults by critical legal studies had made a shambles of the 'traditional constitutive boundaries, such as those separating law from politics, morality, economics or society' (2001: 84). Our focus here is on the epistemological and methodological dimensions of those boundaries or, since these are in a shambles, those intersections.
Critical and Feminist Legacies: Unmaking law to make better futures. An Introduction to a Celebration of Penny Pether’s Life and Work
Authors: Threadgold Terry
Published: November 2024

When I first delivered this paper at the symposium to honour Penny’s life and work, I began by declaring my intention to quote her often, to ensure that she would be heard at the event, as she had been heard at so many others previously. As I said at the time, I did this because I knew Penny would have been very cross if she was not allowed to speak. In this, the written version of that paper, I still intend to quote her often and for the same reasons but I also intend to do so because I believe that what she had to say matters. It intervened, it changed things, it challenged the taken for granted – and it still does. I spent a lot of time re-reading Penny’s words in preparation for the symposium, and like the good structuralist that I always was, I found a whole series of patterns, strategies and theoretical narratives in what I read. I had always known they were there but the process of re-membering, re-working and re-writing, made them much more explicit than they had been in the reality and practice of working with her. I also began to see patterns and strategies I had not recognised at the time and to re-cover the sheer fun and excitement, as well as the absolute seriousness, of what working with her had been like.
Rape Trials, Medical Texts and the Threat Of Female Speech: The Perverse Female Rape Complainant
Authors: Quilter Julia
Published: November 2024

Despite more than three decades of law reform, debate and scholarship designed to improve the legal response to rape, reporting rates remain low, attrition rates high, conviction rates low and conviction appeals in sexual assault matters have one of the highest rates of success (Kelly, Lovett & Regan 2005; Fitzgerald 2006; Daly and Bourhous 2010; Brown et al 2015). Furthermore, dissatisfaction with the criminal justice system remains a key issue for victims of sexual assault (Clark 2010; Daly 2011). This dilemma led Penny Pether to state: But all the speech and the writing, the scholarship and the legislation and the training programs and manuals and the textual artifacts of law reform have changed nothing, except perhaps that a larger number of women in many cultures are reporting rapes, only to experience the various instantiations of the embodied institutional and discursive ‘second rape’ that is one of the predictors of attrition (2009: 243). This article analyses the origins of one particular aspect of, and explanation for, this continuing dilemma: the persistent idea that rape is an easy allegation to make but a difficult one to disprove; that rape trials are about ‘her word against his’. Jordan (2004: 244) has noted that by perpetuating this myth, men have effectively ‘resorted to lying about women’ by perpetuating the lie that ‘women lie’.
Sexual Minorities and the Proliferation of Regulation in Australia’s Asylum Seeker Detention Camps
Authors: Seuffert Nan
Published: November 2024

Penny Pether often focused her considerable energy and talents on marginalised, invisibilised and absent bodies and subjects. Her work also sometimes focussed on texts of national imaginaries, what she called, drawing on Robert Cover, Constitutional Epics, narratives that provide the necessary supplement to the rules of law (Cover 1983: 4-5; Pether 2009: 110-111). One of her current, unfinished, projects was a book titled ‘Perverts’, ‘Terrorists’, and Business as Usual: Comparative Indefinite Detention before and after 9/11,1 which brings together both of these concerns. Her book proposal and first chapter maps a genealogy of indefinite detention through colonial India and Ireland, US chattel slavery and Jim Crow era convict leasing, twentieth century Australian detention camps for Aboriginal people, sexually violent predator laws targeted at homosexual men post WWII that provided for the indefinite detention of ‘sex psychopaths’, the current mass incarceration of black men under life sentences without parole in the US, detention at Guantanamo Bay and immigration and asylum seeker detention. Her focus was on governmental imperatives, the shapes and boundaries of the nation, and constitutional epics of the indefinite detention of marginal subjects. Pether’s interdisciplinary expertise across constitutional and criminal law, law and literature, critical legal studies, analyses of race and gender, colonial and postcolonial studies, and political economy, among other areas, a range matched by few scholars, is evident in even this brief sketch of her proposed book.
'Doing Time'
Authors: Begg Zanny
Published: November 2024

The origins of the phrase ‘doing time’ are not exactly known, but for me it described quite well the nature of being in prison. In this one phrase the active, busy, continuous present tense word ‘doing’ butted straight into the vast, eternal and ominous word ‘time’. The kids I met in Reiby Juvenile Justice Centre were certainly doing time, they were caught up in a range of doing typical of teenage boys – playing video games, or sports like footy, and going to school – yet unlike most teenagers, these activities were measured against an ever conscious register of time: every boy I met could reel off how long was left for him; ‘eight months’; ‘three years’; ‘one and a half years’. These boys had been ‘doing time’ for a long time; all were on long sentences. Most had been inside before. Some also had parents in jail. For these boys, the rhythm of prison was familiar. Frustrated and intensely bored, they would call ‘time out’ whenever the class or conversation would drag. Yet against this ferocious impatience, they talked with an unbearable lethargy about how their days were spent; as one boy explained he was ‘letting the time pass’.
Australian hospitality: Overseas Information Campaigns and the ‘theatricalised’ encounter
Authors: Hightower Ben
Published: November 2024

The preface of a handbook delivered to refugees and holders of humanitarian visas currently overseas and selected for settlement in Australia ends with the words ‘Australia is a wonderful place, full of opportunities and new experiences … WELCOME TO AUSTRALIA’ (DIAC 2011).1 This handbook, given in conjunction with the Australian Cultural Orientation (AUSCO) program, is the ‘beginning of the settlement process for people coming to Australia under the Humanitarian Program’ (DIAC 2012). The ‘official welcome’ is given to each person before they ever arrive in the country. The capitalisation of ‘WELCOME TO AUSTRALIA’ at the end of the message signifies its point: ‘Be welcome here’.
'You can't just go to court and move your body': first-year students learn to write and speak the law
Authors: Kamler B. , Maclean R.
Published: November 2024

This paper shows how first-year university students learn to write and speak the law. We are concerned to make visible the ways in which students begin to acquire the habitus (Bourdieu 1990), the ways of talking and acting and moving, the ways of constructing reality and social relations, which mark them as different from non-law students. Through a case study of one cohort of law students, we examine the institutional and disciplinary contexts in which students come to occupy positions as law students and as potential lawyers. We study two specific contexts of activity: the students' lectures in contract law, and the writing they completed in a unit on 'practical legal skills'. By examining their work early in their first year, we find them dealing with new, distinctively legal, genres, and hence the processes by which they become law students can more easily be made visible.
Imagining evidence, fictioning truth - revisiting (courtesy of O. J. Simpson) expert evidence in the Chamberlain case
Authors: Howe A.
Published: November 2024

Connoisseurs of bizarre criminal cases must have been revelling. Could there really have been any doubt that the two 'trials of the century' would hit the press in the same week, despite a time lapse of thirteen years? On 1 October 1995 the Australian press reported that a third 'limited scale' coronial inquiry into the death of Azaria Chamberlain was about to be opened in the Northern Territory in order to 'clear the public record'. This was to be Australia's eighth judicial inquiry into the marathon miscarriage of justice which was the Chamberlain case, the seven previous inquiries having failed, apparently, to clear the public record. Three days later the media reported that the jury had reached its verdict in the OJ Simpson trial, North America's latest celebrity (read: media farce) murder trial.
Measure for measure: a response to Steven Mailloux
Authors: Frow J.
Published: November 2024

Steven Mailloux tells two stories from Foucault about the birth of Truth in the 'historical division' between an older, performative mode of truth-telling and a mode of truth based in the claim to separateness from untruth. The first story is taken from Foucault's inaugural lecture at the College de France, 'The Order of Discourse' , the second from a summary of a lecture series published in English as 'History of Systems of Thought'. My response is focused on a conflict over the interpretation of these stories.
Public and private - feminist legal debates edited by Margaret Thornton
Authors: Cowdery E.
Published: November 2024

Public and Private - Feminist Legal Debates traverses some well-trodden ground as well as exploring new connections between law, feminism and notions of public and private. Edited by Margaret Thornton, it is a collection of essays written by feminist scholars working in the areas of law and legal theory. It evolved out of an initiative by the Research School of Social Sciences at the Australian National University. The School invited feminist legal scholars from other institutions to participate, as visiting speakers, in its Feminism and Law series. The relationship between the public/private distinction, legality and women emerged as a common theme throughout the series and generated the idea for the collection.
Performativity, regulative fictions, huge stabilities: framing battered woman's syndrome
Authors: Threadgold T.
Published: November 2024

I want in this paper to explore the stories that proliferate around the lived narrative realities of women who kill violent husbands. I will even tell some more stories but I do this in the knowledge that not just any stories will do. As Graycar (1996) has argued there are very real limits to the perfonnative power of feminist narratives if they fail to engage with the huge stabilities, legal discipline, categories doctrines and, I would add, practices, that they are attempting to change.
John Grisham: The chamber (London: Century 1994); The rainmaker (London: Century 1995); The runaway jury (London: Century 1996)
Authors: Sexton M.
Published: November 2024

Let me be frank. Like any practising lawyer, I would prefer to write novels and have them made into movies by Hollywood. A decade ago, John Grisham was practising as a lawyer somewhere in the American South. The Runaway Jury is his seventh novel about the legal process. Its six predecessors have sold some 75 million copies in the English language. Four have already been released as films. The others have no doubt been the subject of deals in the Polo Bar of the Beverley Hills Hotel. How is this phenomenon to be explained?
Sex, lies and needlework: review of The scarlet letter (Nathaniel Hawthorne; movie directed by Roland Joffe)
Authors: Sutherland-Kelly A.
Published: November 2024

I have an image of an extraterrestrial anthropologist holding a copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne's 1850 novel in one hand and a video tape of Roland Joff's 1995 film in the other. I imagine her examining these two versions of The Scarlet Letter as the only artefacts of human culture available to her. I can hear her baffled query: 'what could cause such regression in a civilisation?'
Margaret Thornton, dissonance and distrust: women in the legal profession
Authors: Cowdery E.
Published: November 2024

In Dissonance and Distrust: Women in the Legal Profession, Margaret Thornton provides a compelling theoretical account of the continuing resistance to the participation of women as legal professionals, despite their increased presence in law schools and in some areas of legal practice. She suggests that women are still 'fringe-dwellers in the jurisprudential community' (Thornton 1996: 3-4) and will remain so until it is recognised that the issue is not simply one of women being 'let in' to the profession in equal numbers to men, but also involves posing fundamental questions about the character and constitution of law as it is taught and practised.
Rapunzel and the lure of equal citizenship
Authors: Thornton M.
Published: November 2024

While ‘the citizen’ is believed to signify the universal, there is no universal sex. Because men monopolised the civic space until a century ago, the paradigmatic citizen has been constructed as male. Since enfranchisement, women have been wrestling with the phrase ‘women and citizenship’. For men, the and is read as conjunctive; for women, it remains disjunctive.