Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2123615
Gary Watt, D. Gurnham
At an interdisciplinary university event a few years ago, I found myself sitting beside two colleagues from Music: one of whom I knew slightly, the other I had never previously met. The colleague I had never met asked me which department I was from. ‘I’m from Law’, I said. Her response – ‘Oh – how boring!’ took me by surprise since the orthodoxy of her question had led me to assume that her response would also be blandly amiable. The event was about to start so there was no time for me to discover what exactly my new acquaintance meant by this, let alone respond adequately to it. I can only guess that for this Music scholar, the study of ‘law’ meant studying ‘rules’, and that rules are contained in tedious lists of do’s and don’ts. Stirred to say something by the personal implications that her remark carried about me, but mindful of the difficulty of refuting so firmly stated a view of law in a few moments without sounding defensive, I decided that I could defend only my own corner of it. With a silent apology to my colleagues of various other legal scholarly hues then, I mentioned that the ‘law and humanities’ approach that I use means that I get to read, not merely the legal authorities, but also all manner of interesting sources from the arts. In other words, rather than trying to refute her point, I limited my aim to pointing out a well-established figurative bridge between our respective subjects. Of course, my defence was not merely limited; it was also an act of moral cowardice or even outright betrayal, privileging the particular (me and my self-image) over the general (the character of law as a subject of study andmy colleagues), and relying on a distinction between ‘dry law’ and ‘exciting arts’ that I happen to believe to be a false and damaging stereotype. But what else could I do under those circumstances? Perhaps I would have done better had I been prepared to violate the social and professional conventions at play: that audience members stop talking when an event starts; that one should not try to impose on others the burden of being party to such a violation; that one should avoid self-defensiveness; that one should not seek to pursue a point after it has ceased to be appropriate to do so, or its resolution interesting to the other. It strikes me now that this reflection about social norms also stands as a fitting response to my Music colleague’s position, in that it illustrates that the rules that structure and constrain our behaviours are everywhere and all around, external and internal as well, and that these very often pertain to conventional expectations about the right and a wrong time to act or speak. In the common law too, we find that time is crucial to notions of authority and application – perceived continuities and discontinuities between past, present and future determine the relevance or irrelevance of events as guides for present legal questions, and the prospects that these will in turn be looked to as indicators of
{"title":"AnteEditorial: a personal reflection on law and humanities","authors":"Gary Watt, D. Gurnham","doi":"10.1080/17521483.2022.2123615","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2022.2123615","url":null,"abstract":"At an interdisciplinary university event a few years ago, I found myself sitting beside two colleagues from Music: one of whom I knew slightly, the other I had never previously met. The colleague I had never met asked me which department I was from. ‘I’m from Law’, I said. Her response – ‘Oh – how boring!’ took me by surprise since the orthodoxy of her question had led me to assume that her response would also be blandly amiable. The event was about to start so there was no time for me to discover what exactly my new acquaintance meant by this, let alone respond adequately to it. I can only guess that for this Music scholar, the study of ‘law’ meant studying ‘rules’, and that rules are contained in tedious lists of do’s and don’ts. Stirred to say something by the personal implications that her remark carried about me, but mindful of the difficulty of refuting so firmly stated a view of law in a few moments without sounding defensive, I decided that I could defend only my own corner of it. With a silent apology to my colleagues of various other legal scholarly hues then, I mentioned that the ‘law and humanities’ approach that I use means that I get to read, not merely the legal authorities, but also all manner of interesting sources from the arts. In other words, rather than trying to refute her point, I limited my aim to pointing out a well-established figurative bridge between our respective subjects. Of course, my defence was not merely limited; it was also an act of moral cowardice or even outright betrayal, privileging the particular (me and my self-image) over the general (the character of law as a subject of study andmy colleagues), and relying on a distinction between ‘dry law’ and ‘exciting arts’ that I happen to believe to be a false and damaging stereotype. But what else could I do under those circumstances? Perhaps I would have done better had I been prepared to violate the social and professional conventions at play: that audience members stop talking when an event starts; that one should not try to impose on others the burden of being party to such a violation; that one should avoid self-defensiveness; that one should not seek to pursue a point after it has ceased to be appropriate to do so, or its resolution interesting to the other. It strikes me now that this reflection about social norms also stands as a fitting response to my Music colleague’s position, in that it illustrates that the rules that structure and constrain our behaviours are everywhere and all around, external and internal as well, and that these very often pertain to conventional expectations about the right and a wrong time to act or speak. In the common law too, we find that time is crucial to notions of authority and application – perceived continuities and discontinuities between past, present and future determine the relevance or irrelevance of events as guides for present legal questions, and the prospects that these will in turn be looked to as indicators of","PeriodicalId":42313,"journal":{"name":"Law and Humanities","volume":"16 1","pages":"153 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42417965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2123616
S. Mulcahy
ABSTRACT Despite the growth in scholarship in the broad field of law as performance, there is little critical attention paid to methodologies of research. With attention to the growing research in this field, this paper shall consider methodological approaches to law as performance. This paper considers how traditional qualitative methodologies, such as ethnographic observations, case studies and comparative analysis, are used in law as performance studies. The paper then goes on to consider different methodologies, such as narrative, story-telling and also performance- or practice-led research, which position the legal researcher as practitioner and are under-utilized within legal research. There are difficulties posed by these new methodologies, including framing research questions, demonstrating generalizable claims, and dealing with the subjectivity of analysis. The paper considers how performance practitioners have overcome these difficulties to create performance-led research that yields new understandings, and how these approaches could be brought to bear on the performance of law.
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Pub Date : 2022-07-03DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2123619
Aleksandra Wawrzyszczuk, T. Hume
ABSTRACT Judicial legitimacy is an unexpectedly fragile convention in common law, frayed by the persistent tension between loyalty to precedent and sensitivity to the fluctuating socio-political values of the society. The nature of artistic legitimacy is intuitively more internal as raw imagination is channelled in order to create a purposeful work of art. Repetition, which can be an example of rebellious expansion in art, is found to contribute to continuity in a judicial setting. However, while artists can elect a repetitive practice, judges are necessarily confined to it. In both, the act of repetition gives emphasis to the slightest differences (after Deleuze) which become a focus of public scrutiny. This paper will identify continuity and expansion as two determinants of practice’s legitimacy. It will paint a picture of a judge and an artist who each build upon their own individual as well as collective legacy to legitimize the authority of their vocational action. It will draw parallels between the two practitioners in an effort to identify legitimacy as a driving force of professional practice, whether in law or art. Under such conditions, ‘practice’ will gain a new meaning: with every artwork, every judgment, an individual reinforces or fractures the legitimacy of their professional standing, depending on the extent and impact of the departure from the established (precedent) or acquired (artistic) path.
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Pub Date : 2022-06-24DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2080943
Kanika Sharma
ABSTRACT In From the Colonial to the Contemporary: Images, Iconography, Memories, and Performances of Law in India's High Courts, Rahela Khorakiwala brings together germinal works on the uses of architecture and iconology in and by law with thick descriptions and a close study of the semiotics and symbolisms of the three colonial High Courts (HCs) in Bombay (now Mumbai), Calcutta (now Kolkata) and Madras (now Chennai). This visual analysis of the court site is integral to understanding how the law operates and how the state wishes the public to perceive the law. Khorakiwala weaves through her engaging examination of the legal aesthetics of the courts an examination of them as sites of memory and memorialization and the role that they play in preserving colonial history in a post-colonial state. She helps us understand how these colonial HCs act as sites of contestation upon which newer anti-colonial and postcolonial memories and ideals can be layered to reflect the complex history of the site. However, the book is most interesting when Khorakiwala attempts to scrutinise the ways in which legal symbolism drawn from the local semiotic register is overlaid over Western and colonial legal iconology that dominate the Indian courts. While doing so she gently leads us to the question that pervades the book but remains ultimately unanswered – Is there a unique Indian judicial iconography that can be recognized and deciphered?
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Pub Date : 2022-06-23DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2080937
P. Goodrich
ABSTRACT Megalithic monuments to colonial rule, the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras tower over their respective cityscapes. What do such anachronic and anachronistic architectural presences mean for the populace? How do these looming stones inform the indigenous practice of contemporary law? What sensibility of jurist and the juridical do these lapidary structures inculcate, impose or instil? For Khorakiwala, their khora, tone or reverberations imbued her life as a student, and formed her sense of legal identity and identification, even generating a sense of pride and belonging. When she returns to study these reliquary juggernauts, these chattering anglophonic stones, these vestigial turrets and towers of imperial presence that continue in umbrageous inhabitation of independent India, she confronts resistance and exclusion while also, through meticulously detailed observation, learns to see the markings of local contestation that challenge the immediate sense of external imposition. The buildings are haunted by other spectres and even in their spatial organization and plastic expressions also relay the figures and mythemes of a resurgent sense Indian lore and law.
{"title":"Casting spectres","authors":"P. Goodrich","doi":"10.1080/17521483.2022.2080937","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2022.2080937","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Megalithic monuments to colonial rule, the High Courts of Bombay, Calcutta and Madras tower over their respective cityscapes. What do such anachronic and anachronistic architectural presences mean for the populace? How do these looming stones inform the indigenous practice of contemporary law? What sensibility of jurist and the juridical do these lapidary structures inculcate, impose or instil? For Khorakiwala, their khora, tone or reverberations imbued her life as a student, and formed her sense of legal identity and identification, even generating a sense of pride and belonging. When she returns to study these reliquary juggernauts, these chattering anglophonic stones, these vestigial turrets and towers of imperial presence that continue in umbrageous inhabitation of independent India, she confronts resistance and exclusion while also, through meticulously detailed observation, learns to see the markings of local contestation that challenge the immediate sense of external imposition. The buildings are haunted by other spectres and even in their spatial organization and plastic expressions also relay the figures and mythemes of a resurgent sense Indian lore and law.","PeriodicalId":42313,"journal":{"name":"Law and Humanities","volume":"16 1","pages":"311 - 317"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45730263","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-06-03DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2080940
P. Baxi
ABSTRACT From the Colonial to the Contemporary inaugurates the study of legal architecture and judicial iconography in South Asia. Rahela Khorakiwala's pathbreaking book based in three High Courts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras finds a distinct voice within court ethnographies that provide granulated accounts of the social life of law. This book instructs us on how images, architecture and iconography conserve memories of past injustice and impact questions of access to justice today. The book may be read as an exposition of how courts produce images of ‘justice as virtue' and ‘justice as struggle'. In identifying how the wounds of the past attach themselves to the rituals of courtrooms as sites of memorialization, Khorakiwala suggests that such regimes of images conserve different temporalities in the contemporary. For example, Indian courts are haunted by ghosts that rise from underground rooms to disused dockets today, as if waiting for their stories on death row to find acknowledgment even today. Laws' inheritance therefore is not of pride but also of suffering. For legal architecture produces overcrowding of prisoners and litigants by design. This engaging book makes a compelling case for studying how law’s power speaks through architecture, artifacts, paintings, statues, ceremonies, and rituals.
{"title":"Images, iconography, memories and performances of law in Indian High Courts","authors":"P. Baxi","doi":"10.1080/17521483.2022.2080940","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/17521483.2022.2080940","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT From the Colonial to the Contemporary inaugurates the study of legal architecture and judicial iconography in South Asia. Rahela Khorakiwala's pathbreaking book based in three High Courts of Calcutta, Bombay and Madras finds a distinct voice within court ethnographies that provide granulated accounts of the social life of law. This book instructs us on how images, architecture and iconography conserve memories of past injustice and impact questions of access to justice today. The book may be read as an exposition of how courts produce images of ‘justice as virtue' and ‘justice as struggle'. In identifying how the wounds of the past attach themselves to the rituals of courtrooms as sites of memorialization, Khorakiwala suggests that such regimes of images conserve different temporalities in the contemporary. For example, Indian courts are haunted by ghosts that rise from underground rooms to disused dockets today, as if waiting for their stories on death row to find acknowledgment even today. Laws' inheritance therefore is not of pride but also of suffering. For legal architecture produces overcrowding of prisoners and litigants by design. This engaging book makes a compelling case for studying how law’s power speaks through architecture, artifacts, paintings, statues, ceremonies, and rituals.","PeriodicalId":42313,"journal":{"name":"Law and Humanities","volume":"16 1","pages":"325 - 330"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6,"publicationDate":"2022-06-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48520900","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2096296
M. Nicolini
The Play of Law in Modern British Theatre is an enjoyable read ‘about the interplay of law, politics and history’ (1). It is the first book that assesses this multiple relationship within the context of theatre. Yet, we have a certain familiarity with law and politics engaging with each other; their connexion has been explored, amongst others, by critical legal studies scholars. Taking a clearly political position, this strand of scholarship was particularly concerned about legal education. Unpacking the law meant explaining to prospective lawyers that it is, first and foremost, ‘a political instrument wielded to political purposes’ (12). Legal formalism still draws a divide between the law and the non-legal variables that influence it. As legal scholars, our ‘law job’ is to teach students a welldefined state of mind. Besides a series of ‘behavioural habits’ that will ‘equip them nicely for life as professional lawyers’ (13), we explain to them that the closure of the law to contexts secures its neutral character. The critical legal geographer Nicholas Blomley terms this closure ‘bracketing’, since it constructs ‘a boundary within which interactions take place more or less independently of their surrounding context’. Bracketing is value-laden and ideologicallymotivated. Once enshrined in legal texts, ideology is carefully crafted to fix its legal objectivity and inspire ‘deference’ and ‘unquestioning attitude’ in students, allowing ‘the legal hierarchy’ to perpetuate ‘itself, from one generation to another’ (13). In The Play of Law, interdisciplinary research runs counter to the idea of the autonomy of the law. Ward calls for lawyers’ closer commitment in the life of our political communities. He argues that legal devices must be assessed in context, taking into consideration that their full understanding entails a full understanding of all the variables that affect them. The law is not an empty box incapsulating ‘anonymous authority and power’. Quite the opposite: external factors pragmatically enrich its meaning. My understanding of Ward’s argument is that he also aims to go beyond the mainstream relationship between law and power. As it usually focuses on how ideology is encoded through law, it still represents a form of bracketing, where the law-power interplay is conveyed by means of implicatures, i.e. a linguistic interpretation of the meaning of the law which merely asks ‘what is hinted at by an utterance in its particular context, what the sender’s “agenda” is.’ Ward is interested in a different visualisation of the law, which manifests itself in British drama as written and ‘performed over the previous half-century’ (1). Modern theatre allows him to stage a critical, cross-disciplinary, and contextual
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2075172
S. Egya, M. N. Agu, Safiyya Adam
ABSTRACT Since its inception, Nigerian poetry in English has always been characterized by protest in nature. Beyond its aesthetic scope, it has been critical of socio-political and environmental problems that have bedevilled the nation. This paper is concerned with such literary instrumentalism; the use of poetry by Nigerian writers, living in Nigeria, as an instrument against abuses of human and environmental rights. The theoretical framework that is employed is drawn from the notions of protest writing in Africa and ideas of postcolonial ecocriticism. This will provide a context that brings the fate of humans and nonhumans together under the weight of a failed home government and multinational capitalism in contemporary Nigeria. This study will trace the development of literary and political events in Nigeria, followed by a textual analysis of selected poems. Attention will also be paid to the growth of environmental legislation in Nigeria since the colonial period. This article concludes by arguing that in the absence of an effective or practical legal framework, poetry remains one of the most significant instruments for highlighting the violation of human and environmental rights. As such, the study benefits contemporary scholarship by drawing attention to the social dimension of poetry – and the arts generally – as well as the role literature plays in foregrounding environmental crises in postcolonial societies.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2075176
Françoise Robin
ABSTRACT In the People’s Republic of China (PRC), openly discussing human rights is problematic: an interest in what is sometimes officially referred to as ‘universal human values’ may be interpreted as a contamination by Western discourses that aim ultimately at undermining the authority of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), sole ruler of the PRC since its inception in 1949. Tibetans, who were forcibly and violently incorporated into the PRC in the 1950s, have an even harder time tackling that topic in public. Nevertheless, they have proved skillful over the last decades at resorting to their multi-centennial poetic tradition to discuss openly, although in a veiled manner, such contested topics as linguistic rights, religious freedom, and environment protection, among others. This article will offer a survey of the human rights-related topics that have kept surfacing in Tibetan-language poetry since the 1980s, and will show that poetry has been Tibetan literati’s most favoured tool to debate the undebatable for three decades.
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Pub Date : 2022-01-02DOI: 10.1080/17521483.2022.2069186
Gary Watt, D. Gurnham
This issue of Law and Humanities is largely devoted to human rights and poetry. Five articles on ‘Human Rights and Poetry in a Global Context’ are presented as a special section edited by Rióna Ní Fhrighil and Anne Karhio, and by happy coincidence. This issue is completed by a sixth article, Chris Armitage’s ‘Lord Atkin, the Snail and the Foreigner: Loving the Neighbour and Oppressing the Alien’, which approaches its legal subject not from the perspective of poetry but theology. As long-term readers of this journal will know, its distinctive mission is to carry humanities scholarship that engages with and speaks to the subject of law, and we are delighted that the articles in the present issue fall squarely within that remit. It is also a special pleasure to be carrying work by authors none of whom have previously published with us. The special section edited by Rióna Ní Fhrighil and Anne Karhio is prefaced by their own editorial introduction, so it falls to us as General Editors of the journal briefly to introduce their introduction, and to introduce the two free-standing articles that make up the present issue. The group of five articles edited by Ní Fhrighil and Karhio is bound together by a shared thematic concern with human rights and poetry, but is nevertheless most impressive in its diversity, with contributions from Ireland, Greece, Nigeria, and Tibet. To our memory, the latter is this journal’s first publication with a focus on Tibet. A most welcome novelty. Sadly, there is no novelty in the awful events occurring in Ukraine as this issue goes to press, it is rather the recurring tragedy of human societies that they have so frequently waged unjust war on their neighbours. Amongst the myriad images that have daily accompanied this terrible assault, one of the most voluble, precisely because it speaks of the silencing of what is best in human endeavour, is the image taken in the city of Kharkiv of sandbags being piled up to surround and protect the statute of Ukraine’s national poet Taras Shevchenko. Where other images are visceral, this image speaks bloodlessly of the violence that inevitably accompanies systems of human power, or systems corrupted by powerful humans. Each of the five articles in the Ní Fhrighil and Karhio collection opens a way to understand, or to appreciate better, the power that the poetic promises for the improvement of institutions – the law included – which are always at risk of losing their contact with humanity. One of the articles in the special section – ‘“A black day, this”: Irish Poetry and the Fall of Srebrenica’ is concerned, as the editors say, ‘with events of 11th July 1995 and the subsequent genocide of approximately eight thousand male Bosniaks during the Bosnian War’. Twenty-seven years later, the calendar of dark days reminds us yet again of the need to live with respect for humanity, and (we would say) by the light of the arts and humanities. We leave it to Rióna Ní Fhrighil and Anne Karhio to introd
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