Law, Muteness and the Theatrical

This short composition muses upon the possibilities that the theatrical may offer as jurisprudence or legal theory. Its scope is necessarily abbreviated, modest and confined, intended to inaugurate and not foreclose

Towards a Jurisprudence of the Embodied mind – Sarah Lund, Forbrydelsen and the Mindful Body

As Erika Fischer-Lichte remarked, the great Polish theatre theorist Jerzy Grotowski redefined the notion of the body of the actor as an embodied mind, as a responsive and responding self. Conversely, law abjures the body, its interpreters – lawyers and scholars – inured in practices of rationality, reason and logic, or mindful disembodiment. Travelling through the Danish capital, encountering Danes real and fictitious to illustrate how much we function through our bodies, this essay suggests that we are better and more effective legal interpreters as embodied minds, rather than disembodied minds. But this is not mindless embodiment, a mere reflex or bodily outburst. The embodied mind is self-aware (physically, socially, intellectually) and possesses the same embodied virtuous morality held by Grotowski’s actors. Reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s uniting of the mind-body divide, this connected mind and body challenges the Augustinian negation of the body and associated interpretative assumptions inherited over centuries of legal thought

Lawyers look at the Elgin Marbles, but stars keep them firmly in sight

Legal star power is being deployed in the form of the very well-known London barristers, Geoffrey Robertson QC and Amal Alamuddin, in Greece’s latest attempt to have the Elgin or Parthenon Marbles returned to Greece. Housed in the British Museum in London since 1816, these sculptures have been the subject of contentious legal to-ings and fro-ings since the early 1980s. Under English law, the Museum owns the Marbles, and says it cannot lawfully return them to Greece. Greece contends they were removed unlawfully all those years ago and should be returned. The dispute over the Marbles is one of the most high-profile, and fraught, of the many contested cultural objects and national treasures sitting in museums around the world

Art, Actually! The Courts and the Imposition of Taste

Despite their attempt to avoid questions of taste, this article argues that the courts actively engage in a form of connoissuership. For the most part, this involves the courts rendering images into component elements which alters the image or object, in order to acheive a particular legal outcome. By drawing on the history of the 18th century connoisseur, the article suggests that the courts display many of the features of the connoissuer, even when they disavow any involvement in issues of quality. But sometimes surprising results can occur when the courts, without perhaps realising it, engage in judging about art, as occured in the 2006 decision of the New South Wales Supreme Court involving the Archibald Prize

Contents & Introduction, Law Text Culture, volume 25

This special issue of Law Text Culture, ‘Performing Theatrical Jurisprudence’, seeks to generate new accounts and explanations of law and legal thinking through the new field of theatrical jurisprudence. It invites a reflection on what theatrical jurisprudence can do for law and what law can do for performance

Of the monstrous regiment and the family jewels

This article seeks to engage with the deeply-imbricated anxieties about post-mortem sperm harvesting, and its subsequent use by widows and fiances, in a small body of case law from Queensland and Victoria and the 2005 recommendations of the Victorian Law Reform Commission. It does so by suggesting that these anxieties can be uncovered through unstated cultural resonances about the \u27proper\u27 function of men and women in reproduction. These resonances recall some of the responses to supposed \u27unnatural\u27 and \u27monstrous\u27 behaviours of women, as they were characterised in the initial stages of the early modern period, when the emerging reason and rationality of the new social form collided with superstition and irrational explanations for human conduct. The deep sense of disquiet, and indeed disgust, at the thought that a woman would \u27plunder\u27 and \u27violate\u27 the body of her deceased spouse in order to achieve a pregnancy after her husband\u27s death continues into the 21st century. These responses persist with respect to post-mortem sperm harvesting, though there is now general acceptance of postmortem organ donation, which, until recently, was also the subject of disquiet

Law\u27s empiricism of the object: how law recreates cultural objects in its own image

Watch an antique or collectables show on television, and more often than not, one segment is devoted to testing the knowledge of an expert panel (and sometimes members of the public) with a problem or \u27mystery\u27 object. The object of the exercise (no other word will do so the pun must stay), is to find out what the object actually is, what it was used for, and when it was used. Sometimes the experts know what it is, but more often than not, the host has to tell them. The only way an object can provide some kind of objective knowledge about itself is in terms of a weighing and measuring exercise, but without more, the object is bare, meaningless, and lifeless. The appearances of objects can be deceiving, as Mieke Bal is telling us, because pure and certain objects are meaningless without context, meaning, value, or significance. Meanings and values discursive factors - have to be imposed on these objects in order to make sense of them as objects of culture or objects of value. The only things that an object can tell us with precision are those things we impose upon it

Alice through the wormhole: reconciling spatial and temporal disjunctions in the creation of content in Australian media law

Copy of powerpoint presentation to the conference

Towards a jurisprudence of the embodied mind - Sarah Lund, Forbrydelsen and the mindful body

As Erika Fischer-Lichte remarked, the great Polish theatre theorist Jerzy Grotowski redefined the notion of the body of the actor as an embodied mind, as a responsive and responding self. Conversely, law abjures the body, its interpreters – lawyers and scholars – inured in practices of rationality, reason and logic, or mindful disembodiment. Travelling through the Danish capital, encountering Danes real and fictitious to illustrate how much we function through our bodies, this essay suggests that we are better and more effective legal interpreters as embodied minds, rather than disembodied minds. But this is not mindless embodiment, a mere reflex or bodily outburst. The embodied mind is self-aware (physically, socially, intellectually) and possesses the same embodied virtuous morality held by Grotowski’s actors. Reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s uniting of the mind-body divide, this connected mind and body challenges the Augustinian negation of the body and associated interpretative assumptions inherited over centuries of legal thought

Theatrical jurisprudence and the imaginary lives of law in pre-1945 Australia

If there is anything like an imagined pre-1945 past in Australia, it is one steeped in an Anglophone legal ascendancy. But this is an imaginary past in so many ways. Non-British Europeans came to Australia long before 1945. These earlier Europeans were marked by differences of voice and face, but were eager British subjects, as likely to actively take advantage of law as they were to be subjected to its strictures. By theatricalising their ordinary and extraordinary legal lives through archive and memory, we are reminded that there is more to law of the South than formal accounts which have largely erased their existence, and the fragility of accounts of law beyond living memory