The Metastases of Myth: Legal Images as Transitional Phenomena

In times of transition and transformation, legal images metastasize. This idea can be usefully related both to Winnicott’s theory of transitional objects and Barthes’ theory of myth. But each tell only part of the full story. Barthes fails to fully account for the stabilizing effect of the reassuring signifier; Winnicott fails to fully account for the ideological adaptability—and implications—of the shifting signified. The legal image unites the iterability of the signifier and the polysemy of the signified, harnessing the affective intensity of the former to the cultural mobility of the latter. In this article, I propose to illustrate this insight by reflecting on two notable images of law that appeared at a moment of profound legal transformation, at the dawn of the early modern era. The images of ‘blind justice’ and ‘sol justitiae’ which the article discusses are both ‘transitional myths’, facilitating through modes of affect a legal journey into uncharted territory. Paying attention to these images and above all to their transformation over time, we can observe not only the process of legal transition at work, but the function of the image in its authorization and modalization

Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, volume 26

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

Desert Island Disks: Ten Reveries on Inter-Disciplinary Pedagogy in Law

In this essay Professor Manderson defends the use of inter-disciplinary methodologies in teaching law. Focusing in particular on images and texts of no more than a page's length, the essay insists that a whole curriculum could be devised around these pictures, sounds, and stories. Yet legal teaching, reflecting the character of legal texts in general, has been relentlessly long-winded and linear. They direct us to one conclusion to the exclusion of all others; they close options rather than open them. This is no way to learn: it is untrue; it is tedious; it excludes us from ourselves participating in learning. Other forms of expression have more to say and say it differently. A picture for example has a density to it in its depiction of the relationship of ideas and forces which can be both easy to take in and complex to decipher. Its ability to communicate paradoxical, ambiguous, or double-edged thought repays continuing reflection. Other forms of expression welcome our thinking instead of merely forcing us to submit to its logic. We are embodied beings not logicians. Words are often such abstract ghostly emanations. The physicality of sound or vision draws out memories and associations which offer each observer inimitable divergent paths to interpretation. The reciprocity thus forged between writer and reader, teacher and student, is a grossly under exploited pedagogic resource that provides to all parties an unparalleled richness and discursive power

Respuesta a Luis Gómez Romero e Iker Nabaskues Kangaroo Courts and The Rule of Law. The Legacy of Modernism

Recensió

From Ovid to COVID

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

ANOTHER MODEST PROPOSAL

[In essays first published earlier this year in mainstream Australian media to considerable fanfare, Bagaric and Clarke, two Australian academics, develop a modest proposal for the justification of torture under excep- tional circumstances. This essay rebuts the proposal and defends the abso- lute prohibition against torture. Their attempt to abstract torture from the social context – including the “war on terror” – in which the question of government sanctioned torture is now being raised, is condemned as in- genuous. A rhetorical analysis further demonstrates that the authors them- selves do not believe their argument is either hypothetical or limited. Furthermore, when the actual “defence of torture” is examined, it is shown to be illogical, incoherent, and lacking any sophisticated under- standing of the nature, purpose, or effects of torture. This is not the first time that half-baked reasoning and careless analogies have been devel- oped in order to defend the indefensible. Drawing on Voltaire and Jona- than Swift as well as Guantanamo Bay, this essay puts an important social issue into its immediate and its larger historical context.]

Justice and Art, Face to Face

This essay studies in detail, for the first time and in the context of legal as well as art history, Sir Joshua Reynolds\u27s representation of Justice (1779). We argue that the image is of particular significance in the history of representations of justice, and marks the emergence of neoclassical ideals. These ideals became, for example in the work of Sir William Blackstone, central to the development of Anglo-American concepts of the common law. We argue that Reynolds\u27s work exemplifies a profound shift and a rich complexity in these concepts