Sexual offences and to have done with the courtroom

Abstract

The courtroom is a space filled with judgments that last a lifetime. In sexual offences cases, this judgment might take the form of disbelief in a case relating to rape, inability to express the kind of harm caused, or being face to face with an offender. It could be the loss of liberty, or a life of trauma. With the feminist and spatial turn and relatively new understandings of law’s relationship with space, is it possible to imagine a ‘spatially just’ sexual offences trial built for the bodies of all genders, races and sexualities that must use the courtroom? Despite critical legal thinking’s theoretical achievements in arguing for the Deleuzian ‘doing away’ with authoritarian judgment, the #MeToo era now demands that this task is achieved practically and spatially. This chapter finds that ‘doing away’ with judgment in this context means destruction of the courtroom in favour of a radical new architecture.