bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Remembering the memorial of Jean-Francois Lyotard
Authors: McClure W.
Published: November 2024

Recently [early May] I attended the I.A.:P.L. 'Interrogating the Image' conference at the University of California, Irvine. During the conference, a last minnte decision was made to hold a memorial for Jean-Fran~ois Lyotard. Lyotard died on the 21st of April. Amongst those who spoke at the memorial were, Jacques Derrida, David Carroll, Mary Lydon, Hugh Silverman and Andrew Benjamin.
The place of theory in Australian constitutional law: a review of T Blackshield and G Williams, Australian constitutional lawand theory, 2nd edition, Federation Press, 1998
Authors: Arnott C.
Published: November 2024

The success of Blackshield and Williams' Australian Constitutional Law and Theory Commentary and Materials is well indicated by the speedy appearance of its second, edition. It has rapidly and deservedly become the leading available casebook for teachers and students of law interested in the theoretical dimension to the subject. Australian constitutional jurisprudence, for those of us schooled in it, has been notorious for ignoring the political and sodal nature ofconstitutional law. By this I do not just mean the political context of legislative or government actions and constitutional challenge, but I mean the political and philosophical principles inherent in explaining, interpreting and developing the meaning of Australia's constitution. For those interested in teaching and crafting a principled constitutionalism in this latter sense, the introduction of a theoretical dimension by Blackshield and Williams has been promising.
In Memoriam -- Jean-Francois Lyotard 1924-1998
Authors: Tring V.
Published: November 2024

In Memoriam -- Jean-Francois Lyotard 1924-1998
sketch
The law of the origin in the ontology of consciousness: (Descartes' third meditation)
Authors: Buonamano R.
Published: November 2024

The history of law is a history of finitude, which would be only one of the many histories of finitude, of the human condition or ontology. This irreducible point escapes those who invest all their efforts in understanding law through the scope of legitimacy how does the law come to calculate, decide, institute, pronounce and effect? By what right? On what foundation, origin, universalising pretext, does it so act? If we abandon this line of questioning, the pursuance ofwhich would only lead us through a gyre ofself-referential dilemmas circumventing the concept of 'origin', it becomes dear that it is precisely the role of the origin in its law-configuring mode that problematises what law can and does do, that is to say, what law is. But, even having isolated this theoretical agenda, there are no obvious signposts to navigate one's journey into this 'law-configuring origin'.
Pigeons
Authors: Toracca Tiziano
Published: November 2024

I guess it was a couple of instants after knowing that an airliner crashed into one of the towers of the World Trade Center, the North Tower, right after having received a phone call from a colleague based in Boston, area code 617. He had been awake for two hours already. He had thanked Caroline, hung up the phone, turned the radio on and he had started to get changed – thinking that it was absurd to envy those who were sitting on the boat and were passing in front of the Irish Hunger Memorial for 36 Dollars. It had been one of them: one of those had called Caroline to tell her what was going on. He said so: his name was Colin something. But how on earth could he have told her that he was excited about what was going on? After the phone call with Caroline Bloom, Michael Taro Yamasaky had received other calls, even Matthew O’Brian had called, a prison warden at Jackson State Prison, one with the balls, they would say, one who was not afraid to fill in surveillance reports in prison cells, alone, just with paper and pen.
Introduction - Justice framed: law in comics and graphic novels
Authors: Gomez Romero Luis , Dahlman Ian
Published: November 2024

Justice Framed is born of the passionate and rich – though not always peaceful or courteous – nexus between two long-time companions: comics and law. Comics are utterly gripped by issues of legality, order and justice, but their theoretical and ideological partnership has been conspicuously neglected in legal scholarship. Even in the emerging field of law and the visual, or in the firmly established disciplines of criminal justice studies or law and popular culture, jurisprudential and sociopolitical texts addressing law’s manifestations in, around, and through the comic frame are still an odd rarity – with a few remarkable exceptions. While law’s fascination with control and order is reflected in the existing literature dealing with the governance of comics by legal rules – the law of art – the ways in which comics imagine and depict law – the art of law – are still academically underestimated and underexamined. Fortunately, the situation seems to be rapidly ameliorating. This special issue of Law Text Culture reflects a growing interest among scholars in the insight and opportunity comics provide for illuminating, developing and critiquing law.
The aesthetics of supervillainy
Authors: Fennell Jack
Published: November 2024

When they first appeared during the ‘Golden Age of Comics’ (1938 to 1954), ‘supervillains’ were little more than eccentric gangsters. Criminals with clear motives, they were distinguished from the norm by their use of technological gimmicks or weird costumes rather than special powers. Genuinely ‘monstrous’ supervillains such as the Joker, Two-Face and the undead Solomon Grundy were in the minority. As Mark Edward DiPaolo says, the ‘Golden Age’ Joker was a ‘sane, Moriarty figure’ (DiPaolo 2009: 205). However, the self-regulation of the American comics industry from 1954, under the auspices of the Comics Code Authority (CCA), created conditions that caused characters such as these to evolve into motiveless psychopaths, often mutated or deformed. The portrayal of the Joker
Magic and modernity in Tintin au Congo (1930) and the Sierra Leone Special Court
Authors: Provost René
Published: November 2024

Much ink has been spilled over the years on the portrayal of Africa and Africans in the second album on the adventures of Tintin, Tintin au Congo. Written by Hergé in the early 1930s, the book was revised many times in an effort to respond to critiques that is was an apology of colonialism.2 Tintin au Congo tells the story of the encounter between a young, white European and Africa, as imagined by a Belgian artist living in Brussels in the inter-war period; as such, we can understand Tintin as a depiction by its author of a particular vision of Africa and of a certain understanding of Western presence on the continent.
The legal surrealism of George Herriman's Krazy Kat
Authors: Dahlman Ian
Published: November 2024

In 1947, three years after George Herriman’s death ended Krazy Kat’s thirty-one year run, the prominent legal realist and theorist Karl Llewellyn published a brief but effervescent review of a Krazy Kat collection in the Columbia Law Review. The page count of the new collection was playfully listed as ‘unnumbered; many, but not enough’ (Llewellyn 1947: 337), subtly indicating that neither the review, nor the material it addressed was typical law journal fodder. In that era, it was rare for the world of comics and mass culture to surface in the annals of a law review. The article’s placement between one review of a book on cartel agreements and another review of a report on the Permanent Court of International Justice’s future only amplified the uncanniness of the two-page piece.
Noir justice: Law, crime and morality in Díaz Canales and Guarnido’s Blacksad: Somewhere within the shadows and Arctic-nation
Authors: Hanley Jane
Published: November 2024

Comics have a long history of engagement with concepts of justice. Mainstream comics in English have commonly focused on crime, crime prevention, and punishment as part of their broader preoccupation with themes of power, abuse of power, and responsibility. This engagement is perhaps most obvious in the traditional superhero genre, in which ostensibly ‘good’ heroes are charged to protect the innocent and right wrongs perpetrated by ‘bad’ villains. Analysing the stories of the two iconic heroes Superman and Batman, Reyns and Henson identify a ‘crime control’ model of justice focused on preventing and repressing crime (2010). In this model, the formal legal system is inadequate and due process is failing, thus indicating the need for vigilantism. Yet despite the failures of the legal system, the overall social order and obedience to the law is nevertheless the accepted morality. Phillips and Strobl similarly conclude that the underlying message in mainstream comics is a conservative one: the goal is always to reinforce or restore an 380 Hanley ideal of social order (2006). Thus, the concept of justice can be utilised as a broad model for understanding inequality, abuse and recompense in human relations.
Trials and Justice in Awaara: A Post-Colonial Movie on Post-Revolutionary Screens?
Authors: Conner Alison W.
Published: November 2024

Perhaps surprisingly, one of the most popular Chinese movies of all time is actually an Indian film. Filmed in 1951 in newly independent India, Awaara (The Vagabond) was released in China after the official introduction of the opening and reform policies in 1979, when the country embarked on its current post-socialist, post-revolutionary course. Known as Liulangzhe in China, Awaara received a rapturous response from Chinese audiences and even now everyone over a certain age remembers watching the movie. Thanks to the Internet, many younger Chinese have also seen Awaara, sometimes dubbed in Chinese (I first saw it dubbed in Chinese myself), or if they haven’t seen it they can tell you why their parents and grandparents loved it so much.
Flogging Gum: Cultural Imaginaries and Postcoloniality in Singapore’s Rule of Law
Authors: Rajah Jothie
Published: November 2024

One of the funny things about living in the United States is that people say to me: ‘Singapore? Isn’t that where they flog you for chewing gum?’ – and I am always tempted to say yes. This question reveals what sticks in the popular US cultural imaginary about tiny, faraway Singapore. It is based on two events: first, in 1992, the sale of chewing gum was banned (Sale of Food [Prohibition of Chewing Gum] Regulations 1992), and second, in 1994, 18 year-old US citizen, Michael Fay, convicted of vandalism for having spray-painted some cars was sentenced to six strokes of the cane (Michael Peter Fay v Public Prosecutor).1 If Singapore already had a reputation for being a nanny state, then these two events simultaneously sharpened that reputation and confused the stories into the composite image through which Americans situate Singaporeans.
Hong Kong is a Science Fiction
Authors: Lai-ming Tammy Ho
Published: November 2024

In the early 1980s, China’s state leader Deng Xiaoping put forward the scientific concept known as ‘one country, two systems’ in an effort ‘to realize the peaceful reunification of China’, and this ingenious design was first applied to solve the question of Hong Kong.
Murder Ob/Scene: The Seen, Unseen and Ob/scene in Murder Trials
Authors: McKay Carolyn
Published: November 2024

Tragedies and murder trials explore the relationship between the living and the dead; the present and absent; the seen, unseen and obscene. The central focus of my recent research into viva voce testimony was to consider the role of the live human voice in resuscitating the past crime scene, providing me with the opportunity to observe and interpret murder trials from the perspective of a visual artist who has also studied law. Given my legal background, I was also interested in re-interpreting and deconstructing court procedures, rituals and aesthetics and, through this process, revealing issues of theatricality and the concept of the ob/scene.
Jamming the Law: Improvisational Theatre and the ‘Spontaneity’ of Judgment
Authors: Ramshaw Sara
Published: November 2024

Modern ‘nonscripted’ theatre (NST) clearly owes much to improvisation. Perhaps less obviously, and more surprisingly, so too does modern law. In this article I will contend that, despite all the rules of evidence and procedure, statutes and legal precedents that fundamentally govern the decisions and actions of a judge, it is only through ‘spontaneity’ that judgment can take place. This claim may appear strange to those well-versed in the common law tradition which proceeds on the basis of past legal decisions, or reason where no precedent exists. NST, on the other hand, is assumed to rely heavily on the unprecedented and unreasoned. Therefore, when the public watches a NST production, it places its faith in the belief that what is being observed is entirely new and is being produced ‘on the spur of the moment’.
Caveat Spectator: Juridical, Political and Ontological False Witnessing in CMI (A Certain Maritime Incident)
Authors: Wake Caroline
Published: November 2024

Since the mid-1990s the term ‘witness’ has gained increasing currency in theatre and performance studies. Within theatre studies in particular the term has been associated with the resurrection of documentary and verbatim theatre and the reinvigorated discourse on these practices. Indeed, some scholars have renamed the genre the ‘theatre of witness’ (Schaefer 2003) or the ‘theatre of testimony’ (Salz 1996) while others have described it in terms of ‘performing testimony’ (Salverson 1996). In these accounts the witness is typically a character (often based on an actual person) who testifies to a personal, social or historical trauma. However, the term ‘witness’ has also been used to describe the spectator of these plays, which is to say the subject who listens to these characters and their testimonies. Hence, scholars have started to examine what Karine Schaefer calls ‘the intersection of the spectator-as-witness phenomenon and … the “character-as-witness” play, or the testimonial drama’ (2003: 7).
Introduction
Authors: Handley R. , Pether P. , Pugliese J. , Scott M. , Robinson J. , Hough C.
Published: November 2024

Contemporary culture is currently characterised by distinct movements both from within and without universities which are questioning, rethinking, and rewriting the parameters and ground of traditional academic disciplines. Law/Text/Culture situates itself within this mobile and changing cultural context; it seeks to enable the articulation of the issues and development of the theories and practices generated by disciplinary crossings between fields and bodies of knowledge that have traditionally been seen as discrete and autonomous. Law/Text/Culture is a journal committed to producing intersections of the law, textuality and all aspects of culture. It publishes work across a range of genres - from artwork to the traditional scholarly essay. It invites work which crosses borders - of genres and institutions, as well as disciplines and fields. The journal accepts work from people working outside and inside traditional educational and legal settings. Law/Text/Culture is particularly concerned with both the law's textuality, that is, the specific textual forms by which the law circulates within a culture, and also the multiplicity of texts and subjects which the law touches and shapes, and which, in turn, impact on and change the law. This differentiates Law/Text/Culture from other interdisciplinary journals devoted to the fields of law and the humanities and law and literature.
Eve was framed
Authors: Priestley B.
Published: November 2024

This is an unusual book, written by an unusual person.The book is unusual because, although the author describes it as a polemic about the law, written by one indebted to feminist jurisprudence, it would strike most readers, I think, as coolly professional in a legal sense, with a degree of detached objectivity which gives it much greater force than if it conformed more obviously to its author's own description.
Aboriginal traditional and customary law
Authors: Ginibi R. L.
Published: November 2024

About a month ago, I had a frantic phone call from a new Australian woman named Ramya, of Lebanese descent. She implored me to help her son, a Higher School Certificate student of GranvilIe Boys' High School, as he was given an assignment on the subject of Aboriginal law. He had to write up an in-depth study into forms of Aboriginal customary law and punishment, and why it should be recognised as an acceptable form of trial for Aborigines.
I was flabbergasted! I was desperately trying to explain to her how ironic it was that the education system now wanted to know about Aboriginal law when in fact we were dispossessed of our own land, that we urban Kooris were forced to assimilate and give up our languages and culture and become like white people. We were forced to conform to their laws and standards, the laws and standards of the invaders of our country, because we were never allowed to be our damn selves, as we are an oppressed people. We had our own laws, and a very democratic society before the whiteman stuck his nose into our affairs, and literally stuffed our culture up! Besides, I told her that some of our laws were sacred and not to be spoken about to anyone, only our own tribal people. I told this lady that I would do my best to help her son with what information [had, as I could only speak about the laws of my own Bundjalung people, because it would be wrong of me to talk about any other tribal laws.
"The woman business" : Mill, Trollope and the law
Authors: Higgins C.
Published: November 2024

Consideration of the legal, social and economic status of women and associated debate about the very nature of woman and her proper sphere, dismissively labelled "the Woman Business" by Thomas Carlyle, became a major preoccupation in mid-Victorian thought and writing and central to the legal and social refonns that gradually took place in the second half of the century. As Barickman et. al. point out, rather than being "a debate" per se, it was rather a set of issues, impulses, preoccupations - a pervasive social climate of questioning and change that eventually reached into every class and affected, however slowly, nearly every relationship between men and women in nineteenth-century England.
Dirty pictures: Defamation, reputation and nudity
Authors: Rolph D.
Published: November 2024

There are many ways to damage a reputation. The most obvious way is by words, written or spoken — libel or slander. Centuries of case law, however, disclose that defamation defendants have been endlessly inventive about the means by which they damage a plaintiff’s reputation. In Falkenberg v Nationwide News Pty Ltd, a married couple in the Sydney suburb of Leichhardt complained about a ‘Far Side’ cartoon published in The Daily Telegraph Mirror, which included their actual home telephone number as the relevant, fictitious one to contact Satan. In Bishop v State of New South Wales, a schoolteacher complained about a theatrical performance by school students suggesting that he was in a sexual relationship with a colleague. In Monson v Tussauds Ltd, the plaintiff, a man against whom a verdict of ‘not proven’ had been returned in a Scottish murder trial, complained about a waxwork dummy of himself, which was on display in the ‘Chamber of Horrors’ in the famous London waxworks, Madame Tussauds, alongside convicted murderers. In his judgment, Lopes LJ noted that it was not necessary for defamatory matter to be written or spoken, that even ‘a statue, a caricature, an effigy, chalk marks on a wall, signs, or pictures may constitute a libel’.
WearComp 4
Authors: Mann S.
Published: November 2024

Artist: Steven Mann Artwork: WearComp4
The haunting of gay subjectivity: the cases of Oscar Wilde and John Marsden
Authors: Dalton D.
Published: November 2024

I offer the juxtaposition of the two images opposite [see article] as a visual index of the arguments presented in this article. For I seek to address how notions of gay criminality are intricately connected in a nexus of history, cultural memory and the practices of naming and figuring, through which the past prevails to haunt the present. Consider figure 1. On the right hand side is an image of Oscar Wilde as he was sketched in court during his first (defamation) trial in London in 1895. On the left hand side is an image of a man named John Marsden — a photograph taken at the time of his 1999 defamation case in Sydney. His name does not accompany the image. Rather, by way of a substitute, the caption ‘The trial of an Australian Oscar Wilde’ dominates the cover. Both men are captured in profile; a perspective that Bertillon standardised as beneficial for archive purposes and one that is also used for ‘mugshots’. The juxtaposition of these two images invites judgment. The singularity of Wilde and his crimes is erased by the invocation of his name in relation to another man, John Marsden. The images perform an affiliation and confirmation. The wealth of criminality invested in the iconic figure of Oscar Wilde becomes a lens through which we can imagine the crimes of this man named as ‘an Australian Oscar Wilde’.
Distracting the masses: Art, local government and freedom of political speech in Australia
Authors: Gelber K.
Published: November 2024

Visual images in the form of politically explicit street art can evoke passionate responses. In the arena of political culture these responses can be educative or vilificatory, constructive or abusive, and form part of public debate. Where these images are censored, restricted or banned through legal intervention by government, however, the debate takes on a different tone because it interacts with free speech principles. What are the limitations of valid government intervention against controversial political art? Is it justifiable, and if so when and under what circumstances, for government to censor political views with which it disagrees or which it may consider hurtful or offensive to members of the community within which the art is exhibited? What are the limits to legal regulation of politically controversial works of visual culture?
‘The gentlest of predations’: Photography and privacy law
Authors: Ludlow C.
Published: November 2024

In December 2004, Peter James Mackenzie, a labourer from the beachside suburb of Coogee in Sydney, pleaded guilty before a magistrate to a charge of offensive behaviour for photographing women who were bathing topless at the beach without their knowledge or consent. He forfeited his expensive Nokia mobile camera phone and the images he had taken. ‘[The women] were quite horrified by what you were doing … Women are not objects of decoration for men’s gratification,’ said Magistrate Lee Gilmour as she fined him $500 (The Sydney Morning Herald 2 December 2004).
Passing resemblance: the burden of the mask in legal and theatrical tradition
Authors: Watt Gary
Published: November 2024

Legal scholars have frequently observed that the word ‘person’ and the language of legal ‘personality’ derives from the Latin persona, which was the ancient Romans’ term for an actor’s mask, but they have seldom attended to the theatrical significance of the mask and sought there for insights into the legal idea. To address that lack, this article presents three case studies connected by concern for the passing on of theatrical masks. The first mask was made for a ballet directed by the Hungarian dancer and choreographer Rudolf Laban in Germany in the 1930s. The mask escaped when Hitler burned Laban’s books and was passed from hand to hand until it eventually found its way to England. The second mask is the mask of Pulcinella, one of the principal stock characters or ‘Masks’ of the commedia dell’arte. The focus in relation to this mask is upon its passing to the renowned Italian actor Eduardo De Filippo and from him to his actor son, Luca. The third is the hannya mask of traditional Japanese Noh theatre, which is a demonic mask associated with scorned and jealous women. It features in the cult Japanese horror film Onibaba (Shindo 1964) where it carries a cautionary tale on death, the passing of masks, and the fixing of masks; a cautionary tale that this article carries over to the performance of masks in law. The three case studies suggest that the burden of the mask is most keenly felt when it is laden with the weight of tradition. Whilst taking a broadly positive view of the art and artifice of theatrical masking, it is acknowledged that the benefits of masking depend upon artificial representation through a non-human property and therefore cannot exist without corresponding burdens, including the burdens inherent in property relations, representation, and mediation.
Staging repair
Authors: Sheikh Danish
Published: November 2024

This paper articulates “repair work” – drawing from Eve Sedgwick’s concept of reparative reading – as a jurisprudential activity. In the late 90s, Sedgwick urged her scholarly community to invest in reparative readings as a contrast to the prevalent hermeneutics of suspicion. The reparative impulse, she wrote, “is additive and accretive …. it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self”. A commitment to reparative reading entails an openness to surprise, to the rendering of the self as vulnerable, to the potentially traumatic experience of hope. In this paper, I describe how a material and theatrical jurisprudence imbricated within the body might give us the tools to perform repair.
I anchor my paper on a descriptive experience of the 2016 Indian performance piece Queen Size. At a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence in the country, this was a show which staged a joyful dissent against the law, centering around the public display and celebration of an act of queer intimacy. I read this performance in conversation with Robert Cover’s celebrated essay “Nomos and Narrative” and a 1934 sodomy trial before the High Court of Sindh. Reassembling these texts, I pay attention to how each of them are staged, along with my own restaging. This form of dramaturgical attention allows me to forage and weave together seemingly disparate objects that vary in time, genre and form. In the process, it allows me to stage a jurisprudence of repair.
The forensic precinct: notes on the public address of law
Authors: Rush Peter D.
Published: November 2024

‘[T]he quarter where lawyers most do congregate’ in 1863 was Collins Street, Melbourne (Victorian Legislative Assembly 1863). The subsequent construction of the Law Courts building (1884), and the nearby High Court building (1928), moved the focal point onto William Street but kept the orientation towards the Collins Street end. In the last twenty five years, however, old courts have been shifted, new courts have been built, law offices and educational institutions have gathered. In a material sense, the landscape of law has been reconstructed and transformed. We are accustomed to think of the places of law in terms of its courts, tribunals, chambers and allied professional offices. Yet what has come into view in the City of Melbourne is a new legal place. It is now routinely referred to as ‘the Melbourne legal precinct’. In this place, laws take place not only in relation to the building of courts and the occupation of varied professional legal associations; they are also generated by the conduct, representation and form of the precinct itself.
‘The vacillating manners and sentiments of these people': Mobility, Civilisation and Dispossession in the Work of William Thomas with the Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate
Authors: Standfield Rachel
Published: November 2024

The Port Phillip Aboriginal Protectorate was established in 1838 on the instructions of the Colonial Office in London as an attempt to place colonisation in the newly settled Port Phillip district — now the state of Victoria — on a humanitarian footing. The Protectorate was established on the recommendation of the British House of Commons Aborigines Committee, which published the report of its investigation into the treatment of Indigenous people within the British Empire in 1837 (British House of Commons 1837).
Cover Image: Statue of Limitations
Authors: Sunkoo Kang
Published: November 2024

Statue of Limitations is a two-part bronze sculpture. It depicts a flag pole with the flag flying at half-staff. It is cut in two halves that will be installed in separate locations. The lower half of 11m height will be permanently installed in the stair hall of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin-Mitte. The upper half of equally 11m height will be exhibited on Nachtigalplatz, a public square in the so-called “African Quarter” in Berlin-Wedding.
Excerpt from Cultural Techniques of Law. Remarks on a Format of Legal Studies
Authors: Steinhauer Fabian
Published: November 2024

What is at stake here? I want to present ‘cultural techniques of law’ as a research and pedagogical programme - a ‘format’ - which has developed between the disciplines of law, media studies and cultural studies; or more precisely, at the interstices of these respective disciplinary boundaries (Vismann 2012a). I do so in the form of an essay and try to make some further suggestions for the programme. The essay is written from a position that is not fully identical with ‘law’. The term ‘format’ is meant to reflect the existence of such a programme, without claiming that it has been realised successfully. Such an incomplete identification of law with the method of its study is not a co-incidence. The starting point to think about law ought to be law’s difference rather than identity. It is in this sense that cultural techniques of law are the techniques of differentiation, modification and transmission that reproduce law. Culture does not refer to a historically stabilised identity, but only to what is made and reproduced. Cultural techniques of law are techniques that ‘operationalise’ legal differences: they divide, translate and transmit legal differences along (pre)formed, directed, exterior routes.
Contents, Introduction & Contributors, Law Text Culture, volume 23
Authors: Kang Hyo Yoon , Kendall Sara
Published: November 2024

Table of Contents, Introduction & List of Contributors, Law Text Culture, volume 23, 2019.
The Silent Echo of the Law: Phenomenology and the Cosmology of Buddhism
Authors: Wijeyeratne R. D.
Published: November 2024

The core argument I present here seeks to affirm the phenomenological insight that we have no reflexive access to the event of the law (Ljungstrom. 1997: 78). In this respect I proceed from Panu Minkkinen's observation that "in its everyday activities, Dasein is involved with available law continuously without being reflectively aware of it" (1996: 70). In order to retrace the event of the law in Sri Lanka to a primordial relationship of 'proximity' with the cosmology of Sinhalese Buddhism, I initially focus on the relationship between the ontological horizon of the Buddhist cosmos and Sinhalese Buddhist mythology. 1 As will become evident, this mythology is actively engaged with in the debates appertaining to the law on the recognition of language in Sri Lanka. I go on to argue that the ontological meaning of the Sinhalese Buddhist cosmos awaits arrival in the social, the legislation on language (The Official Language Bill) constituting one such event.
Unmasking the Stranger American Welfare Residency Rules and the Encounter with the Other
Authors: Fallinger M.
Published: November 2024

One American welfare doctrine that refuses to die embarrasses the American optimist-modernist credo that time always brings progress. That doctrine, most recently resurrected in President Clinton's welfare reform legislation, the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act of 1996 (PRWORA), permits states to impose what euphemistic bureaucrats call a "durational residency requirement" on impoverished citizens seeking government assistance to provide food, clothing, and shelter for their families. Where this rule once meant that impoverished citizens could be denied all welfare benefits for up to a year after they moved to a new state, in its current less draconian form, the PWRORA residency rule permits an individual state to provide the lesser of either its own minimum benefit or the benefit from the newcomer's state of origin for a year. However, this apparently kinder and gentler doctrine has ominous consequences for real people: for example, Edwin and Maria Delores Maldonado, who moved from Puerto Rico received $ 304 per month (the benefit level in Puerto Rico) when they arrived at their new home in Pennsylvania, instead of the $ 836 per month that Pennsylvania's long-term needy residents were getting to meet their subsistence needs. Similarly in Roe v. Anderson, a case argued in the United States Supreme Court in early 1999, the lower federal court noted that a family of four moving from Mississippi, where $ 144 would provide a subsistence living, would be hard-pressed to survive on that amount in Los Angeles, where the highest housing costs help push the minimum subsistence level for that family to $ 673 a month.
After Serrano Sacrifice and Church Politics
Authors: Casey D.
Published: November 2024

Casey, Fisher and Ramsay claim to speak in the name of "Christianity and the values of ordinary people". In order to claim to speak for Christianity, they must clearly demarcate who does and who does not have the right to call themselves Christian. Any ambiguity must be excluded. So called "liberals" must be cast out to the extent that they would compromise the integrity of the group. This attitude is much more akin to performing sacrifice than understanding it. But then, my respondents could make neither head nor tail of what I described as the logic of sacrifice. The logic of sacrifice as I understand it is founded in the binary logic of the "A" versus "not A" distinction. What is clear from the extensive anthropological and sociological literature on sacrifice is that it is sacrifice that forms identity and community through integration and separation. Both communion and expiation safeguard the unity of the community through a process of differentiation. Whether a particular sacrifice is concerned with communion or expiation, its underlying logic is grounded in opposition. The underlying unity of these two modes of sacrifice is perhaps best expressed by the English word "atonement" which "is also always at-one-ment", to make at one. Although Hubert and Mauss had recognised the irreducibility of these two modes, they were unable to establish their unity. Nancy Jay suggests that this was due primarily to their commitment to the idea, beloved of French sociology, that the unity of sacrifice lay in its function as a means of "establishing a means of communicating between the sacred and profane worlds" (Jay 1992: 165 n4). Although Durkheim would not accept this distinction, sacrifice is only about the sacred in as far as the sacred guarantees the identity of the community.
Language as Mimesis
Authors: Volcher L. E.
Published: November 2024

This essay brings the idea that language is mimesis, in something like the Greek sense, into contact with certain Eastern images and ideas. Heidegger defined mimesis, well enough for my purposes, as the presentation or production of something in a manner that is typical of something else. (Heidegger 1991, vol I: 173) Keeping this image of mimesis in mind, I want to extend to language the inversion of traditional aesthetic theory that Nietzsche accomplished when he thought of art from the point of view of the artist--the creator of images--rather than from the point of view of the one who merely views or contemplates the so-called "finished work of art." (71) Just as Nietzsche elevated the artist to prominence in his theory of art, I make language into something that is above all an active doing from the speaker's or writer's perspective, and not just a passive receiving from the perspective of a hearer or reader. When Hegel wrote that "the act of dividing is the force and labor of the understanding, of the most wonderful and grandest, or rather, of absolute power," (Heidegger 1991, vol III: 223, citing Hegel Werke 1832-45, vol II: 25) he wrote from the perspective of a recipient--someone before whom the divisions made by speech appear as something else that they themselves are not. In contrast, what I mean by mimesis is very definitely not the linguistic picture that is made, taken by an observer to be an act of understanding. Still less do I take it to be a pictorial thing that stands in relation to what it represents. Rather, what I call mimesis is the creative energy of picturing itself. And while I do not deny that language is also poiesis, in the Greek sense of producing something in words. (Heidegger 1991, vol I: 165), I am far more interested in displaying the act of production itself as image-making--as a kind of mimesis--even, or rather especially, in those cases where a speaker or writer produces words that no one takes to be an image.
The Semiotics of Photographic Evidence
Authors: Kibbey A.
Published: November 2024

What makes evidence credible? This question is central to the operation of a legal system because it has so much to do with winning or losing a case. Credibility often hinges on semiotic elements of a trial that are not recognized by law, but which every lawyer recognizes as crucial to the presentation of a case. This semiotic dimension of a case is generally perceived as notoriously unpredictable in its impact. Judges and juries can bestow credibility or withhold it based on a witness's sweating brow, fidgeting hands, tone of voice, the racial and gender characteristics of every person involved in a case, the demeanor and dress of every lawyer, of each defendant. While lawyers pay lip service to the ideal of arguing the evidence of a case to a reasonable conclusion, what lawyers hope for is some incontrovertible evidence that stops the debate, a "smoking gun" that dismisses doubt and shuts down the semiotic play that can influence or even determine credibility.
Left (Over) Rights
Authors: Roithmayr D.
Published: November 2024

As an intellectual movement in legal scholarship, Critical Race Theory ("CRT") was formally inaugurated twelve years ago, at a 1989 critical theory conference in Madison Wisconsin. Although the movement had its own historical narrative of development (Crenshaw 1995: xvii-xxvii), it had inherited much of its direction and methodology from two immediate intellectual precursors, the civil rights and critical legal studies ("CLS") movements. (xix) From the latter, CRT had adopted the critique of modern liberal legal consciousness, and in particular, the argument that law was reflected and reinforced the exercise of power by elites. From the former, CRT had drawn a deliberately modernist commitment, both to analyze law using the lens of race as a central category of analysis, and to use law in some sort of affirmative program to advance racial emancipation. (xxvii; Harris 1994: 750-54)
Introduction
Authors: Pether P. , Sarat A.
Published: November 2024

When we were asked by Desmond Manderson, the Managing Editor of Law/Text/Culture, to edit this special edition of Law/Text/Culture we tried to find scholars working in North America -- established and new alike -- who were either doing particularly interesting interdisciplinary work in law and the humanities or who were interested in essaying this kind of work for the first time. We looked for scholars situated both inside and outside the legal academy, and above all for people who were interested in working across different genres and modes of texts and at the same time exploring issues that implicate law in/and culture. The group of articles and essays we collected demonstrate both a wide range of innovative scholarship and a central concern with using interdisciplinary methodology to engage critically with law's cultural forms, investments, and manifestations.
Writing and Praxis: Law, History and the Postcolonial
Authors: Duncanson I.
Published: November 2024

This Special Issue of Law Text Culture, ‘Making Law Visible: Past and Present Histories and Postcolonial Theory’ originated with a one-day symposium at the University of Waikato titled ‘Law, History and Postcolonial Theory and Method’. The symposium sought to recognise and stimulate multidisciplinary analyses through the lenses of postcolonial theory that made visible the operation of the law at the intersections of ‘race’, class and gender from colonial times to the present. The focus was on New Zealand, other white settler societies, and Pacific nations. We set out to address questions about what constitutes postcolonial research in law and history; whether specific methodological frameworks or theoretical challenges apply to this kind of work; and whether ‘new’ methodological or theoretical approaches have been developed and articulated. Our aims were to involve a group of people in a project that explores new methodological approaches to research around the questions we pose, and to create a multidisciplinary project across history and law that allows us to create new ways of seeing, discovering and investigating these intersections.
Shaping the Modern Nation: Colonial Marriage Law, Polygamy and Concubinage in Aotearoa New Zealand
Authors: Seuffert Nan
Published: November 2024

Feminist scholars and critical theorists have critiqued marriage as a tool for the creation of a private sphere in which women are subordinated to men, and have critiqued the public/private dichotomy (Olsen 1983, 1985, Pateman 1988, Smart 1992, Seigel 1996). Marriage jurisdiction and law also participates in the creation of the public order, including the production of a homogenous nation opposed to cultural and racial difference, and embracing particular notions of gender (Cott 2000: 1–8, Franke 1999, Dubler 1998). Throughout the 19th century colonisation of Aotearoa New Zealand the jurisdictional boundaries of colonial marriage law were increasingly constructed and policed to assimilate the indigenous Maori people to a centralised jurisdiction while simultaneously producing race and gender difference within the nation-state. This boundary maintenance operated through a series of statutes and cases that participated in the production of a raced and gendered nation in two ways. First, this article discusses the cases and statutes that extended the jurisdiction of the colonial courts, and colonial marriage laws, over the indigenous Maori people, assimilating Maori to a centralised, homogenous set of laws and practices, and excluding Maori marriage laws and customs from that jurisdiction, and from the emerging nation-state. These laws were increasingly rigidly applied to fix the boundaries of the nationstate. Second, this article traces the racing and gendering of marriage jurisdiction as a process of the creation of internal difference within the emerging nation-state. As colonisation proceeded, Maori marriage laws and customs were increasingly excluded from the jurisdiction of the colonial courts by associating those laws and practices with pre-modern concepts such as concubinage and polygamy and opposing them to raced and gendered notions of civilisation and progress associated with the modern nation-state. The result was the production of a vessel of marriage jurisdiction that aspired to modernity, purity and whiteness and that was shaped and filled with Victorian notions of gender.
The Problem of the Fetish in Law, History and Postcolonial Theory
Authors: Grbich J.
Published: November 2024

Postcolonial theory’s engagement with the questions of psychoanalysis are beginning to reveal colonial paradigms within both the theory of psychoanalysis and the practice of its treatments. It is not surprising that a methodology for reaching some personal understanding of the western condition of alienation and trauma should reveal aspects of western knowledges as dependent upon past practices of colonial dispossession and destruction of non-western peoples and lives. What is surprising is to find the extent to which early modern western anxieties regarding the ethical treatment of non-western peoples should remain fixed within various languages in which present forms of colonialism continue to reap their harvests of life and death for western treasuries.
Law, History and Postcolonial Theory and Method
Authors: Seuffert Nan , Coleborne C.
Published: November 2024

This Special Issue of Law Text Culture, ‘Making Law Visible: Past and Present Histories and Postcolonial Theory’ originated with a one-day symposium at the University of Waikato titled ‘Law, History and Postcolonial Theory and Method’. The symposium sought to recognise and stimulate multidisciplinary analyses through the lenses of postcolonial theory that made visible the operation of the law at the intersections of ‘race’, class and gender from colonial times to the present. The focus was on New Zealand, other white settler societies, and Pacific nations. We set out to address questions about what constitutes postcolonial research in law and history; whether specific methodological frameworks or theoretical challenges apply to this kind of work; and whether ‘new’ methodological or theoretical approaches have been developed and articulated. Our aims were to involve a group of people in a project that explores new methodological approaches to research around the questions we pose, and to create a multidisciplinary project across history and law that allows us to create new ways of seeing, discovering and investigating these intersections.
Interview: André Dao and Behrouz Boochani
Authors: Dao André , Boochani Behrouz
Published: November 2024

The following text is an edited transcript of a conversation, conducted in English, between André Dao and Behrouz Boochani, two of the artists who made how are you today: André from Melbourne, Australia, Behrouz during his incarceration on Manus island, Papua New Guinea. The conversation took place on 3 December in plenary at the 2019 meeting of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia, on Yugambeh land in the Gold Coast. Boochani had arrived in Aotearoa, New Zealand barely two weeks before, following more than six years of detention on Manus Island, having originally sought asylum in Australia.
Carceral atmospheres on Manus Island: Listening to how are you today
Authors: Russell Emma K
Published: November 2024

This paper develops a conception of ‘carceral atmospheres’ as a way of framing our encounter with the sound art and archive how are you today, created by the Manus Recording Project Collective (MRPC). This 2018 work involved the creation and collection of 84 field recordings by six asylum seekers and refugees indefinitely detained on Manus Island by the Australian government. I argue that a proper engagement with the medium and mode of production of how are you today – that is, offshore detention and transborder solidarity – requires a sensory politics that is attuned to the dynamic and increasingly diffuse nature of carceral power. The paper explores the tension between the tangible and intangible nature of carceral space, the heterogeneity of prison soundscapes and the significance of time to experiences of punishment. Complicating the presumption of sound as object of analysis, I consider how field recordings both convey and create atmospheres.