bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
On Rivera's 'Detroit Industry': community beyond knowledge
Authors: McKay J.
Published: November 2024

In this essay I will read one of the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera's (1886-1957) most important works, 'Detroit Industry' (1932-33, Detroit Institute of Arts [DIA], Detroit, Michigan, USA), as a work about the nature of community construction. 'Detroit Industry' depicts a car factory in Detroit in the early 1930s, the labour processes that are involved in the production of the car, and the community's labour that sustains and reproduces itself. Rivera is a communist straightforwardly depicting labour and alienation in the capitalist mode of production, and the problems that this presents for building a community. The Marxist critique of the bourgeois state is at the core of the problematic of community construction, though not the sole difficulty.
Wheelchair as semiotic: space governance of the American handicapped parking space
Authors: Marusek S.
Published: November 2024

The wheelchair has become a stereotypical symbol of physical disability. The image may appear as a picture, as on parking signs with a blue background and a white figure sitting in a wheelchair, or in reality when one sees an actual person sitting in one. Both images are useful in characterising the governance of the handicapped parking space, a field that presents a unique case study in the interpretation and enforcement of law. The parking space is legally reserved for vehicles marked by the Blue Wheelchair which hangs as a tag from the rearview mirror or on the licence plate; but at the same time it is socially reserved for vehicles driven by a person who is dependent upon an actual wheelchair. Law enforces this space formally by ticketing and/or towing violating vehicles. Society enforces this space informally through the disciplining gaze of onlookers. Legal enforcement is based upon the presence of the Blue Wheelchair symbol as it matches the sign that towers above the reserved spot. Social enforcement judges and disciplines through the qualifying observation of visible disability in the form of a wheelchair. However, what happens when a Blue Wheelchair symbol is present, but an actual wheelchair is absent? Which source of legitimacy is treated as the more authoritative?
Introduction - LTC volume 18
Authors: Wan Marco , Leung Janny
Published: November 2024

At the time of writing, the Occupy Central Movement (or the ‘Umbrella Revolution’, as it has become known in the international media) is in full swing in Hong Kong. Spearheaded by two professors and a Baptist minister, it dovetailed with local student movements and quickly expanded into a demonstration encompassing people from different walks of Hong Kong society. This movement was sparked by an electoral reform package imposed on Hong Kong by China, under which the only candidates for the city’s Chief Executive would be nominated by a committee likely to be composed of members acceptable to Beijing. The Chinese government insists that the system is a democratic one insofar as Hong Kongers would still be able to choose their leader through ‘one person, one vote’, but the Movement points out that the committee’s screening renders the voting process meaningless. The Movement was galvanised by the local police’s use of tear gas against the peaceful protestors, who have called for the repeal of the reform package, the re-opening of the dialogue on Hong Kong’s constitutional development, as well as the resignation of the city’s current, and highly unpopular, leader.
Umbrella Movement
Authors: Leung Janny
Published: November 2024

Collection of photographs highlighting the use of the umbrella as a symbol of protest in Hong Kong.
The Name of God on Trial: Narratives of law, religion and state in Malaysia
Authors: Neoh Joshua
Published: November 2024

The power to name is both an awesome and awful power – it isan exercise of sovereign power. In the Abrahamic religions, themonotheistic God is the ultimate sovereign. The power to name God,then, is one of the most magnificent powers that is conceivable tohumans: it is the sovereign power to name the ultimate sovereign. It isthis naming of God that has been put on trial in Malaysia. The statedecrees that the name ‘Allah’ is only to be used in reference to theIslamic God. Christians, in response, have insisted that the state has nomonopoly over the power to name God, and they too should be able tocall their God – the Christian God – by the name of ‘Allah’. The matterends up in court, where judges are asked to decide on the name ofGod. This case raises a perplexing puzzle: how on earth did the humanjudges in Malaysia end up with the power to name the divine judge?
Closed-Circuit Television Testimony: Liveness and Truth-telling
Authors: Leader Kathryn
Published: November 2024

A witness who gives evidence orally demonstrates, for good or ill, more about his or her credibility than a witness whose evidence is given in documentary form. Oral evidence is public; written evidence may not be. Oral evidence gives to the trial the atmosphere which, though intangible, is often critical to the jury’s estimate of the witness. Butera v DPP (Vic) (1987) The legal arena may be one of the few remaining cultural contexts in which live performance is still considered essential (Auslander 1999: 9).
The Farce of Law: Performing and Policing Norm and Ahmed in 1969
Authors: Crawley Karen
Published: November 2024

Late one night on a deserted street, Norm, a working class Anglo-Australian male, stops Ahmed, a younger student from Pakistan, to ask him for a light, and strikes up a conversation. Norm seems friendly enough, but there is an undercurrent of hostility to his speech and behaviour, as if he is slyly baiting or taunting Ahmed. When the conversation draws to a close, Norm offers a parting handshake to Ahmed which suddenly becomes a punch to the stomach and face. ‘He grabs Ahmed’s head and bashes it against the post. Then he flings the limp body over the handrail’ (Buzo 1968: 26). Norm then utters the final, shocking words: ‘Fuckin’ boong’.
The Mask and Agamben: the Transitional Juridical Technics of Legal Relation
Authors: Parsley Connal
Published: November 2024

Italian theorist Giorgio Agamben is well known for his complex critique of the institution and praxis of thought in the west, and in particular for taking aim at a constellation of ontologico-political structures denoted by the term ‘juridical’. Within this endeavour, Agamben provides a critique of the metaphysical subject and of the related notion of the person. Specifically, for Agamben the figure of the human is structured and produced by the dignitas: the image or mask which bridges the juridical, moral or ‘natural’ person, and the condition of their appearance within law and political life. As he wrote in a recent collection of essays: ‘Persona originally means “mask” and it is through the mask that the individual acquires a role and a social identity’ (2009c: 71).
Tityrus
Authors: Horn N.
Published: November 2024

In the rather delicate matter of giving a title to this essay on titles, I take my cue from the novel under Paul Auster's name, Leviathan: this paper is named after a monster. The tityrus is a mythical beast, a cross between a sheep and a goat (OED), a creature epitomising the tendency of titles to mark the crossing of borderlines in the law and in literature.
Codes, dooms, constitutions and statutes: the emergence of the legislative form of legal writing
Authors: Robinson V.
Published: November 2024

In this paper, I would like to look at the "emergence" of legislation in two different senses. First, there is the historical emergence of legislation as a distinct fonn of legal writing. I have the impression that legislation is often seen as something modrn when it is ancient with legislative texts predating just about all other legal and non-legal texts. To work out how ancient the legislative tradition is, we have to decide what we treat as legislation. Second, there is the possibility of legislation emerging as a significant topic for law and literature studies. I have the impression that legislation is often seen as peripheral and ephemeral when it is now central and structural. I also have the impression that legislation is seen as a barren area for law and literature studies when there are some interesting questions to ask about how legislative texts work and how they fail. I would be happy to be wrong in these impressions. It is encouraging to see a couple of sessions at this conference devoted to legislation.
Sanctioned irregularities : martial law in Billy Budd, Sailor
Authors: Dolin K.
Published: November 2024

For the American legal historian Robert Cover, the writing of Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process was a political as well as a scholarly project. This study of nineteenth-century American judges who, despite their own opposition to slavery, ordered the return of escaped slaves in accordance with the Fugitive Slaves Act, provided an analogue for a contemporary conflict between law and conscience, the enforcement of compulsory military service in Vietnam. In his Prelude to Justice Accused, Cover offered a literary exemplum of this conflict: the story of Captain Vere in Melville's Billy Budd. He also proposed one of his "accused" judges, Lemuel Shaw, Chief Justice of Massachusetts and Melville's father-in-law, as a possible model for Vere. Since then, a number of legal-historical readings of Billy Budd, connecting Melville's narrative with the judicial practices of Shaw or his age, have been made. In this paper I review this line of interpretation, and then seek to develop it by focusing on shifts in the discourse of martial law.
Mabo and the politics of community
Authors: Schirato T.
Published: November 2024

The main interest of this paper is to attempt to theorize, not the current Mabo debates, or even the various media productions of Mabo, but rather the notions of community which the media and other related institutions use to contextualize, situate, and evaluate Mabo. More specifically, I am going to suggest that various conservative productions of Mabo can be read as being predicated on discourses and narratives which strategically and necessarily locate Aboriginal peoples simultaneously inside and outside the so-called Australian community. This paper does not attempt to trace the various developments, legal and otherwise, which led up to the High Court judgement in June of 1992, as does, say, Tim Rowse's 'Mabo and Moral Anxiety' (Rowse 1993). This paper is concerned, not so much with what Rowse calls 'The Possibilities of Moral Community' (1993: 245), as with the deployment of the notion of Australian community as a political and ideological practice. This, and other related issues, are to be addressed and theorized through reference to, and appropriation of, two recent sets of writings on the politics of community: specifically, Carole Pateman's and Slavoj Zizek's (separate) descriptions and critiques of enlightenment and social contract theory.
Get the picture: Central Australian indigenous paintings, which reveal collaborative thought about contemporary social situations
Authors: San Roque C.
Published: November 2024

In central Australian languages the words for ‘thinking’ and ‘understanding’ are the words for ‘listening’ and ‘hearing’. The root verb, kulini (Pitjantjatjatjara) leads to kulinara palyani; ‘to plan or work out how to do something’. This is what we are doing here; looking at these paintings; trying to ‘get the picture’ and attending to what the pictures reveal.
The perpetrator in focus: Turn of the century Holocaust remembrance in The Specialist
Authors: Guerin F.
Published: November 2024

In his controversial 1998 film, The Specialist, Israeli director Eyal Sivan casts the Holocaust in a new light when he represents it through the eyes of the Nazi perpetrator. Sivan and his scriptwriter, human rights activist Rony Brauman, re-assemble and manipulate footage originally filmed by Leo Hurwitz for Capital Cities Broadcasting of Adolf Eichmann’s trial by an Israeli court in Jerusalem in 1961. Specifically, Sivan recycles the video footage of the trial into a 16mm film that critiques, not the heinous nature of Eichmann’s crimes, nor the depravity of the man who committed them, but the system of regulation that constructed and judged Eichmann. While the video footage was originally filmed as a document of the trial, Sivan radically redeploys the same images in a narrative that exposes the manipulations of the court, its representations and the continued injustice of such institutions and representations today, 45 years later. According to The Specialist, Eichmann’s actions are not on trial; they are a foregone conclusion. To prove Eichmann’s guilt or innocence was not the point of the trial in the first place, and it is certainly not the goal of The Specialist. Through its careful weaving of fragments of the proceedings, over the course of its narrative, The Specialist reveals the relationship of otherness — the differences and identicalities — between Adolf Eichmann, the ‘deportation specialist’ and Attorney General Gideon Hausner for the prosecution. Simultaneously, the film considers the relationship between Eichmann and the crimes of the National Socialist Party as they were forged by the Israeli court.
Terror: the danger of legal theatre
Authors: Štěpáníková Markéta
Published: November 2024

When Ferdinand von Schirach wrote Terror, a perfect example of the legal theatre was created. It is a trial or tribunal play that deals both with current legal issues and a profound legal-philosophical dilemma of sacrificing human lives for the lives of others. Moreover, this play provides a space for the audience to express their legal opinion in a very theatrical way. In a sense, this play refers to the roots of ancient Greek theatre (see eg Gaakeer 2019) and its fundamentally political meaning.
Thus, it may seem that this play is an answer to every law and theatre scholar’s prayer for a practical example of a widely know trial play. Unfortunately, it is more complicated than that.
In a way, any theatre about law – legal theatre – is political theatre. Through its influence, legal theatre can pose consequences for the rule of law and democracy.
In this text, I will focus on the specifics of legal theatre and its possible consequences. My research takes the form of a case-study of Ferdinand von Schirach’s play Terror. For comparison, another legal theatre play will be used: Milada. Milada is a documentary theatre play based on a real political trial concerning Milada Horáková in the 1950s in Czechoslovakia.
Through the analysis of both plays, I will determine and explain the most problematic issues. This issues are, of course, too broad to deal with in one paper, so I will focus on the question of ‘reality’ in the presentation of law in both plays and its possibly dangerous consequences, especially in the geographical area of Central Europe.
‘Alive in the Telling’: Trailblazing Women Lawyers’ Lives, Lived with Law
Authors: Rubenstein Kim
Published: November 2024

The title of this chapter is inspired by Kirin Narayan’s book - Alive in the Writing: Crafting Ethnography in the Company of Chekhov (2012), who I heard speak at the Australian National University where she was later appointed Professor in the School of Culture, History and Language.1 Kirin engaged us all in her life journey as an anthropologist with verve, passion and energy. Her message was that ‘when words gather together with energy, others places, other people, and other voices stir in parallel life’ (2012: ix). She reminds us that writing can be as powerful as her oral presentation in conveying her drive and spirit and she provides great insights on how we can all seek to be ‘alive in the writing’.
Contents, Contributors and Introduction, LTC - volume 20
Authors: Genovese Ann , McVeigh Shaun , Rush Peter D.
Published: November 2024

This collection of essays for Law Text Culture is a collaboration and meditation on methods and genres of life writing, and how they might be adequate to the task of taking responsibility for legal thought and lawful relations as lived in Australia today. In many ways, these essays, and what they represent together, could be described as Legal Biographies. For a very long time, Legal Biographies have been written to animate the study of the common law and its institutions through lives of jurists and judges.
Containing Aboriginal Mobility in the Northern Territory: From 'Protectionism' to 'Interventionism'
Authors: Howard-Wagner Deirdre , Kelly Ben
Published: November 2024

In Arnhem Land, when the white people came, they wanted us to move off our homelands, into the missions and government settlements. Some people did, and some people always stayed on their homelands. In the larger communities, there was often fighting between clans because they didn’t live like that before. Some of the people who had moved to the communities decided to go back to their homelands … We are very confused by what the Government has been doing to us lately. Has the Government changed its mind again, to stop treating us like people? ... We want both governments [Australian and Northern Territory] to recognise that there is a Land Law here that was here before either of them, and is still here (Our Home, Our Homeland 2009: 5). This quote captures how two Indigenous policy approaches in Australia — ‘protectionism’ in the early 20th century and ‘interventionism’ in the early 21st century — have sought to contain and settle traditionally mobile peoples.
‘The main thing is to shut them out’ The Deployment of Law and the Arrival of Russians in Australia 1913-1925: An histoire
Authors: Leiboff Marett
Published: November 2024

On Tuesday 10 August 1915,2 a 25 year old Russian3 named Neplen Matanakes was allowed to disembark from the SS Empire in Brisbane, the capital city of the state of Queensland in the recently federated Australia. A year into World War I, Neplen’s journey had started a few weeks earlier in the Chinese Russian city of Harbin. Like other Russians before him, Neplen made his way to the Japanese seaport of Dairen (or Dalny), also located on the Chinese mainland. He then joined the SS Empire at Kobe, Japan, on one of its regular round trips to Australia and, after brief stops in Hong Kong and Manila, the steamer arrived in Darwin on 1 August 1915. The three unnamed Russians on board were mentioned in dispatches telegraphed south.4 Brisbane was the SS Empire’s first capital city landfall in Australia and, by disembarking here, Neplen followed the path of thousands of other Russians who arrived in Australia through its most northerly state capital.
The measure of a man's worth (after MLK and the content of his character) [poem]
Authors: Te Punga Somerville Alice
Published: November 2024

1. Small seeds tucked away, water stored, some dogs, a few rats look into the faces of relatives you will not see again for several hundred years sit quietly at night surrounded by constellations and a dizzying stretch of liquid the most humbling metaphor and word trick of them all: ocean-going vessels, blood vessels; genealogy and water mix in our part of the world
Spectre of Jurisdiction: Supreme Court of New South Wales and the British Subject in Aotearoa/New Zealand 1823-1841
Authors: Rumbles Wayne
Published: November 2024

The construction of New Zealand as a colonial nation was not a conscious act or a single design but the result of cumulative actions (Moon 2006: 22). It started long before and continued well after the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi, and subsequent proclamations of sovereignty. This paper focuses on the period prior to the Treaty of Waitangi when the Supreme Court of New South Wales had jurisdiction over British subjects living in the ‘Islands of New Zealand’.
Introduction, contents and contributors LTC15
Authors: Seuffert Nan , Kukutai Tahu
Published: November 2024

This issue of Law Text Culture has its genesis in a research project on Mobile Peoples Under the Eye of the Law which was originally proposed by Associate Professor Cathy Coleborne at the University of Waikato. The project was supported with a grant for a one day symposium, held in December 2010, from the University of Waikato Contrestable Research Trust Fund, for which we are grateful. As guest editors we invited contributions of postcolonial analyses that investigated mobile peoples, in Australia, New Zealand and the Pacific, both historically and in the present. We were especially interested in the ways in which regulation and surveillance in all of its forms — legal, policy, administrative and so forth — produced and constructed mobile peoples, and how categories of gender and sexuality were shaped in relation to mobile peoples in and through these regimes.
‘Natives’, ‘Immigrants’ and ‘libérés’: The Colonial Regulation of Mobility in New Caledonia
Authors: Muckle Adrian
Published: November 2024

With reference to the theme of mobility, this paper explores the separate but often overlapping regimes designed to police or control ‘natives’, libérés (freed convicts and ‘immigrant’ (indentured) labourers in New Caledonia during the colonial era. In so doing, it also seeks to sketch the forms of mobility and circulation that were sanctioned and regulated by colonial authorities.
‘You people talk from paper’: Indigenous law, western legalism, and the cultural variability of law’s materials
Authors: Stauffer Jill
Published: November 2024

Focusing on Delgamuukw v. British Columbia, this paper argues that it is not difficult, if one takes a fair look at Gitxsan and Wet’suwet’en governance, to see legal ways of knowing drawn from specific materials. The materials are different from the ones western law draws on, but that does not render them less legitimately legal. To get beyond prejudices about what counts as law, settler courts may have to begin by admitting that indigenous oral narratives, songs, totem poles and other aspects of material culture are legal materials. Then those who work in those courts would have to interrogate that new knowledge, and perhaps learn that in getting there by that method they ended up bringing colonialism with them. Instead, perhaps we can ask how someone trained as a lawyer in a textual tradition might learn to see that a song, a story, a ceremonial robe, or a totem pole, could be law or legal title rather than evidence of those things. After all, Canadian jurisdiction is as much a story as anything brought forward by the elders who testified in this case. A materialist approach cannot guarantee a better parsing of the problems of communication here, but it may shine a brighter light on what counts as jurisdiction and thus make it more difficult to accept without question that Canada’s courts have the right to decide a case like this.
Against the Power of Algorithms Closing, Literate Programming, and Source Code Critique
Authors: Krajewski Markus
Published: November 2024

Current commentaries on digital change have emphasised the reality of our increasing exposure to the power of algorithms. My intervention examines this assertion with a media-historical approach that traces arguments raised in a legal case to the point of software inception. I show that the power of algorithm is based on the eminent cultural techniques of reading and writing. As an antidote to this power, I propose the concept of source code critique, which draws upon historiography and so-called ‘literate programming’, and which could help to introduce transparency into an algorithm's opaque agency.
Case Against Manifesto
Authors: Crossan J. D.
Published: November 2024

Detailed cases are not nearly as dramatic as sweeping manifestos but case-laws often effect what clarion-calls can only proclaim. Indeed, sometimes the sheer radical beauty of the manifesto can so exhaust the human imagination that nothing else happens afterwards. Christian commentators, for example, will often exalt Gospel over Law, New Testament over Old Testament, and even Christianity over Judaism on exactly that comparison. They may cite the Pauline manifesto in Galatians 3: 28 asserting that, "there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus". The basic human differences, hierarchies, and discriminations of race/religion, class, and gender are declared irrelevant, at least for Christians. What could be more ideal and magnificent? But what exactly are its external effects and social repercussions? Is it all just internal and spiritual; meaning that we are all the same inside, that our souls are unraced, unclassed, and ungendered in the sight of God? And, if that is all it means, is that enough?
Being Original Law and the Insistence of the Sacred
Authors: Fitzpatrick P.
Published: November 2024

To continue, somewhat presumptuously. This present offering takes up the story where my previous contribution to Law Text Culture left off, and that contribution in its turn was a continuation of a prior performance in New Formations (Fitzpatrick 1997: 1998). Those two papers can, and will now, be summarized with distressing ease as a prelude to the engagement here with law and the sacred. What the story so far presents is a situated analysis of the question of the origin in modernity -- a question which is simultaneously about where 'we' come from and who 'we' are. And what the story begins to show is how law provides an answer to the question. And, as we will see, that story is already touched with intimations of the sacred. In this paper, the sacred becomes central, the story breaks away from its own beginnings in Freud's myth of origin, the productive parricide first recounted in Totem and Taboo (1960), and it assumes a more jurisdical dimension. The question of the origin, I argue, is heightened rather than disposed of in modernity. Without a resolving reference to some transcendent realm, and thence to some sacred mediation between the transcendent and the profane, the irresolution of the origin becomes manifestly obdurate. We can only come to the origin from where we already are, an origin which is thence the same as us; yet to originate we must emerge as different from an origin which is anterior to and apart from us. Operatively, there has to be some resolution and that resolution is law. We come from the law, a law which is the ever responsive origin of the way we are now. The irresolute dimensions of the origin just sketched out match the dimensions of law. With its combining the quotidian where we are with what is ever apart from us, law is the insistence of the sacred.
Unsaying Law The Voice of Longing
Authors: Edwards R.
Published: November 2024

The humble one prays for Justice. The cynic calls to him and says: "I see you pray everyday, but have you ever received a reply?". He halts his prayer and falls away, confused. In a troubled sleep a voice comes through a dream and asks "Why have you stopped praying?" -- "I have never received an answer". The dream voice says: "But your longing is the response you wait for. It is the longing that draws you into union with your beloved".
The Colony of the Dead (Poem)
Authors: Birch T.
Published: November 2024

a colonial jewel of the southern sea this playground all columns and quarried stone its fix seeped in veins of gold leaves a taste on the tongue and a nagging scratch
The Life and Death of a Protest Anthem at the Frontier of a New Cold War
Authors: Leung Janny HC
Published: November 2024

Amidst the rise of a new Cold War between China and the US, Hong Kong has been called Ground Zero, the new Berlin, or the Global Frontier by various media outlets. During an ongoing US-China trade war, the Water Movement broke out in 2019. It was the largest and most prolonged social movement that Hong Kong has seen, and one that was met with the direst consequence – the imposition of a sweeping National Security Law that has changed the political landscape of Hong Kong. Soon after the social movement erupted, the song Glory to Hong Kong gained huge popularity and came to be known unofficially as the ‘national anthem’ of Hong Kong. It has been sung regularly at protests, with many language versions being circulated on YouTube. Taking a social semiotic approach, this paper interprets the meaning of this protest anthem, teasing out its multimodal layers and analysing its production, lyrics, musical form, digital renditions, and live performances in light of the evolving socio-political situation at the time. The analysis suggests that certain renditions of the song expressed not only political defiance but also a budding national imagination as a route of redressing injustice, as disappointment in rule of law grew; however, ideological cohesion among movement participants remained limited. Although the National Security Law has successfully quenched such political expressions, confidence in the rule of law has to be restored in order to provide a much-needed pressure valve for Hong Kong.
Singing the Law: The Musicality of Legal Performance
Authors: Mulcahy Sean
Published: November 2024

What would the law sound like if it was sung?
Whilst scholars have explored the relation between music and law, focus on the acoustic and musical dimensions of legal speech is relatively new. Exploring musical adaptations and remixes of legal transcripts, the paper argues that there is a latent musicality to legal speech.
Using as case studies Opera Australia’s production of ‘Lindy’ and Donmar Warehouse’s production of ‘Committee’, where legal speech was adapted verbatim from legal transcripts into musical score, the paper investigates what these composers have to say about their jurisprudential source material. Through advancing this notion of latent musicality within legal speech, this paper suggests that legal speech works best when it appeals to its audience in the way that music appeals to its listener in terms of rhythm, pitch, and tone.
Alexa and the Making of the Neoliberal Ear
Authors: Amsellem Audrey
Published: November 2024

Smart home device Amazon Echo, equipped with a voice assistant named Alexa, is a new ear within the home, gathering previously inaccessible sounds of the domestic sphere. Devices such as Echo are constantly ‘on’ and listening, but whether Echo is always recording is subject to speculation and ambiguity. In this article, I use Echo to theorise sonic surveillance through what I term the ‘neoliberal ear’– a twenty-first century mode of listening to the world embedded into ‘surveillance capitalism.’ (Zuboff 2019) I examine the relationship between non-creative recording practices and voice-enabled technology within the context of neoliberalism and its legislative allowances.
Conceptualizing Amazon Echo as a complex sonic object that listens to voices in the domestic space in order to gather information on the subjectivity of its users while normalizing the ubiquity of listening in, I investigate the surveillance capabilities of the device, and conduct a sound studies analysis of dispossession and displacement in surveillance capitalism, which I argue are rooted in the split between listening and recording in US copyright law. To discuss Echo’s legal ground, I focus on a murder case in which Echo was requested as evidence, considering the specificity of sound within privacy law, and analysing the relationship between Echo and the First and Fourth Amendment of the US Constitution. I view these sonic theorisations of the US legal framework as an initial step to form a neoliberal history of aurality through the conception of the neoliberal ear.
Fear v Hope: The battle for language
Authors: Howe C.
Published: November 2024

These poems have been written in response to the many articles focusing on the ‘War on Terror’ that have appeared in Australian newspapers over the past six years. I have been disturbed by the use of language in many of these articles, which have been produced by the mass media to be consumed by the reader, as opposed to pondered, interrogated, challenged and engaged with on a critical and creative level. The complexities and nuances of language use have been overlooked in the widespread acceptance of terms such as ‘war’, ‘terror’, ‘insurgent’, ‘freedom’, etc.
Constitutional Law
Authors: Andrews J.
Published: November 2024

Judge, Politician, Bureaucrat: three arms of tri-limbed monster, each a suited brother protecting us from all the fears and harms threatened by foreign monsters and each other.
Introduction: The Protection of Law
Authors: McNamara L.
Published: November 2024

Who needs law’s protection? Who does law protect? Does law need protection from politicised abuses? Can we restore law to a rightful place in the social? Did it ever have one? These were the provocations of the call for papers for the Australasian Law and Society Conference, on the ambiguous and unsettling theme ‘The Protection of Law’. The works featured in this special issue of Law Text Culture have their origins in two events held at the University of Wollongong in 2006 and 2007. The first was that conference, hosted by the University’s Legal Intersections Research Centre and Faculty of Law in December 2006.
Intersections: What is the current climate in which we work and live?
Authors: Krishnabhakdi-Vasilakis F.
Published: November 2024

For many, the events of 11 September 2001 predisposed Western societies to collective fear not dissimilar to that felt at other moments of crisis in history. A few years on, the shockwaves have flattened and the notion of terror has institutionalised fear on several levels: the emotional, the social and the political. Fear, it seems, justifies varying degrees of administrative arbitrariness; as long as there is a commonly acknowledged threat like terrorism, public opinion (when informed by fear rather than knowledge) can be swayed to overlook the politicised abuse of the law. The protection of law from arbitrariness and from the fear that makes arbitrariness possible is, then, a pressing issue in the current climate. This paper explores intersections of visual culture and a general rhetoric of terror as myth-making processes to see how these translate into public opinion. First I examine some historical evidence for the political management of fear in Socratic philosophy, while the second part looks at visual and literal rhetoric.
Protecting Law from Morality’s Stalking Horse: The ‘socio’ in much socio-legal studies
Authors: Wickham G.
Published: November 2024

Invited a few years ago by one of the field’s leading journals ‘to stimulate discussion about the nature, role and future of socio-legal studies’ ( JLS Editors 2002: 632), Roger Cotterrell (2002) and Paddy Hillyard (2002), two leading socio-legal scholars, stress the connection between the legal and the moral. Morality, they believe, is the heart and soul of the law. For them, only when socio-legal studies allows the law-morality connection to be its guiding light is it at its strongest. To list five of their examples, this type of morality-to-the-fore socio-legal studies is open to many influences, is flexible in how it interprets these influences, produces a rich diversity of intellectual outcomes, expands the boundaries of what counts as ‘law’, and, in doing so, is a leader in the utilisation of the work of Michel Foucault (Cotterrell 2002: 632–9, Hillyard 2002: 646–50). The field would be lost, they suggest, without the law–morality connection. This high regard for morality — as the driving force of law, as the very raison d’être of socio-legal studies — is hardly unusual: it is the common currency of the highly influential brand of socio-legal scholarship that is consistent with the individual reason-based tradition (exemplified by John Rawls, esp. 1971) or the communitarian tradition (exemplified by Alisdair MacIntyre, esp. 1988). Yet I contend it is very dangerous, threatening the role of the law as a vital cog in modern Western countries.
The Underground and Sky Diary
Authors: Blanchfield S.
Published: November 2024

I spent a lot of time on and in the London Underground during June–September 2006 at all times of the day and night, marvelling at the density of people who use this system of transport every day and as a way of connecting with all the major London stations and airports that spread across the country and to Europe. It was impossible for me not to think of the bombings in July 2005 when on the tube and I was always thankful when I got off and emerged onto the streets again. One of the social rules is that you can’t make eye contact on the Underground too often, so I used to stare at the patterns on the seating upholstery and work out the repeat sequence to take my mind off the claustrophobic tunnels and crowds. There was a palpable tension in the carriages. The Paris Metro had a completely different feeling — much lighter and friendlier with the buskers moving from carriage to carriage. My other work, Sky Diary, includes the three days of cancelled and restricted flying in and out of London airports due to the foiled terrorist plot in August 2006.
En piel ajena: The work of Teresa Margolles
Authors: Scott Bray R.
Published: November 2024

Teresa Margolles is a founding member of SEMEFO, Servicio Médico Forense (Forensic Medical Service), an artist’s collective in Mexico City that created artworks using forensic materials between 1990 and 1999. Since the late 1990s Margolles has created her own solo encounters around death and the mortuary, extending SEMEFO’s interest in the biographies of the dead in relation to social, political and economic practices. This article traverses Margolles’ distinctive forensic and aesthetic history to arrive at her testimonials to the dead women of Ciudad Juárez on the US/Mexico Border. Known as ‘The City of the Dead Girls’, Ciudad Juárez has more than a decade-long history thick with the unsolved murders and disappearances of women in this borderland; a situation that has received increasing international attention. As deputies to the dead, Margolles’ artworks about the dead women of Juárez resonate with ethical tensions present in other work. Yet her practice offers a curiously forensic compassion. This article explores those practices to consider the relationship between mourning, the forensics of death and posthumous biography lived in the shadow of law. To begin, the article introduces two texts, one literary, the other cinematic, to consider the concept that anchors Margolles’ work and the concerns of this article: the life of the corpse. Thereafter, in moving to discuss specific artworks, the article considers the funereality of her aesthetics and the reconstitution of crime, evidence and violence in Mexico that emerges in the wake of Margolles’ labour. Ultimately, the article is interested in these moments which remind us of death; a passage marked on and by the body, even in its absence.
The text of muteness in personal injury litigation
Authors: Hardy S.
Published: November 2024

I have previously drawn a detailed analogy between the genre of melodrama and personal injury litigation (Hardy 2004a, 2004b: 155- 77). In particular, I have identified a kind of template narrative which is revealed in the trial transcripts and judgments of personal injury trials, which I call the ‘legal injury narrative’. I have described this as an explanatory narrative that provides a structure for telling a story about how people are undeservedly injured and how they are able to have their consequential suffering recognised and alleviated. Evidence of the legal injury narrative’s content and structure can be found in collections of transcripts and judgments in the same way as the content and structure of a particular literary genre can be revealed by a study of a number of different novels. The legal injury narrative and melodrama have many similar characteristics, including the simplified and individualised attribution of blame, the passivity of the protagonist, and the fictionalised restoration of the status quo in the resolution of the narrative. In this article I will focus on another similar attribute: the text of muteness.
The Labouring Undead: Zombification as a Metaphor of Contemporary Crisis-Management
Authors: Reitz Chris
Published: November 2024

The discursive field of economics is traversed by a multiplicity of metaphors. Yet, some conceptual domains lend themselves more readily to the expression of the ideological premises of financial affairs. The period since the economic meltdown of 2007 has been defined, in this regard, by a generalized apocalyptic vocabulary. In this paper, I propose to focus on the image of zombification that has become ubiquitous in crisis-management discourses, especially in the talk of so-called ‘zombie companies,’ ‘zombie banks’, or ‘zombie economies’. This discourse articulates the prospect of widespread economic collapse due to collateralized corporate debt. Inscribed with a distinct ontology of undeath, the metaphor, then, is conductive to a specific ‘necro-economic’ gesture that naturalizes the ‘Market’ as the basis of life itself, which, however, from time to time demands sacrifices to be restored and support life again. This becomes especially clear in contemporary re-circulations of Joseph Schumpeter’s theory of ‘creative destruction’, which assert that the ‘zombies’ must be neutralized to avoid the contamination of an otherwise ‘healthy’ system. As such, though, the discourse of economic zombiism is thoroughly underpinned by an imperialist unconscious that can be traced back to the emergence of the zombie figure in the context of pre-revolutionary Haiti. I propose to read the appropriation of the ‘zombie’ by neoliberal parlance as a metaphor that capital survives by. Functioning as a form of applied horror fiction, it establishes agency for ‘impersonal’ market mechanisms that externalize economic costs onto the peripheries of capitalism. In this sense, however, I argue that the rhetoric of crisis-management merely offers an imaginary resolution to a problematic that generates zombies not as an aberration but as a matter of course. Thus, I suggest that the ‘financial zombie’ functions simultaneously as a metaphor of chronic crisis and a metaphor of systemic immunization.
From Ovid to COVID
Authors: Manderson Desmond
Published: November 2024

We get the metaphors we deserve. On the one hand this essay explores, in the shadow of Susan Sontag, the meanings and implications of the metaphorical language that was deployed by state and society to understand COVID-19 and to regulate our response to it. On the other hand it argues that the pandemic is not so much a metaphor as a metamorphosis: not a sign of something new but a symptom of something that has already taken place, a profound transformation that appears dramatic only if you have failed to notice the underlying compounds that, like a witch’s brew, have been slowly bubbling away all along. The 2020s revealed with new clarity the forces of neoliberalism that have been eating away at the roots of our societies for thirty years. Social distance, working from home, the gig economy, new limits on civil society. All these underlying socio-political aspects of the neoliberal social contract were brought into sharp relief. Yet a crisis is not an epilogue but a moment of decision. It may be then, that the very visibility that COVID-19 has rendered these underlying forces provides us with an opportunity to reconsider them. If nothing else, the experience of COVID-19 has clarified the ways in which our self-interest, economic and psychological, depends on the welfare of others; the ways in which the economic prosperity and standard of living of each of us relies on a whole range of public goods from higher education and universal health care to decent welfare systems to affordable child care. If the metaphor of the lockdown turns out to signify a dies non for reflection or to catch our breath, it will have been worth it after all.
Metaphoric Sovereignty and the Australian Settler Colonial State
Authors: Chalmers Shane
Published: November 2024

There is a pronounced anxiety within Australian jurisprudence at the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. This essay argues that the anxiety is symptomatic of the fact that metaphor is not only the source of Australian law, but the source of this law’s very (il)legitimacy. To develop this argument the first half of the essay focuses on Australian High Court cases that have addressed the use of metaphor in the creation of the law. Here the essay draws out two observations. The first is the Court’s prohibition against metaphorical legal reasoning; the second is the fact that metaphor is nonetheless the source of Australian law. This picks up on Justice Kirby’s observation, that British law was extended over Australia based on a claim to ‘occupy’ and ‘possess’ a continent upon which the British had barely set foot. The essay argues that these two observations are connected: the Court’s repudiation of metaphorical legal reasoning cannot be understood separately from the role that metaphor played in the violent foundation of Australian law. The second part of the essay is an attempt to think more carefully about how metaphor, and the metaphor of the body, has shaped and substantiated colonial sovereignty, and how this contrasts and interacts with First Nations’ sovereignty. The focus here is on a public festival held in 1850 to inaugurate the Colony of Victoria. The festival involved a public performance in which the colonists gave expression to their fantasy of being the rightful sovereign of the land, while including First Nations within it, as a constitutive part of the colonial body politic. But the festival also highlights the failure of the colonial effort to extinguish First Nation sovereignty through their inclusion. While colonial sovereignty is metaphorical, First Nations’ sovereignty is ontological – resulting in a state in which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are both a constitutive part of the Australian body politic and sovereign First Nations.
Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, volume 26
Authors: Manderson Desmond
Published: November 2024

The essays in this collection grew out of an online symposium series organized in the middle of the 2020 pandemic lockdown in Australia. We had a sense of the vital role of metaphor in how we think; vital in the twin senses of crucial and full of life. We wanted to find out more from colleagues working in disciplines as diverse as history, cultural studies, critical theory, law, and philosophy. We wanted to think about the role of metaphors in how we confront difference; in how we make sense of the world; in the political, legal, and social challenges of the world we live in. What metaphors frame our thinking and to what ends? The answers that emerged orbit around a series of underlying tensions: metaphor as necessity, opportunity, and impurity; metaphor as natural, as strategic, as tactical; metaphor as a way of living, a way of seeing, and a way of obscuring; metaphor as keeping faith and metaphor as betrayal; metaphor as critique and the critique of metaphor. In exploring these tensions, three matters of concern kept recurring, and these three themes form the structure of the collection to follow: colonialism, monsters, and disease. Each chapters focuses on one of these themes, but all convincingly draw out their interconnections and mutual implications. What is colonialism but a monstrous disease? What are these monsters but diseased colonists? What is disease but yet another colonising monstrosity?
What have our homes become? Metaphor and metamorphosis in the pandemic lockdown
Authors: Jenkins Fiona
Published: November 2024

During the lockdowns enforced to meet the COVID-19 pandemic, homes were tasked with sustaining life in a time of emergency, taking on multiple new functions and inviting reflection on modes of their inhabitation. Asking ‘what have our homes become?’, the article explores the metaphorical life of ‘home’ as the locus of a set of powerfully normalizing and normative functions as well as potentials for transformation. The article weighs the meanings to be found in the exceptional time we were ‘at home’ during lockdowns, in company with Bruno Latour’s sense of the metamorphosis lockdowns brought, Giorgio Agamben’s analysis of this as a time of emergency, heightening executive powers, and Bonnie Honig’s counter-story of emergency politics as requiring democratic attention to the time and terms of emergence from a period of difficult choices and narrowed capacities.