1,613 research outputs found
Comics, Law, and Aesthetics:Towards the Use of Graphic Fiction in Legal Studies
This article argues for the inclusion of comics amongst the resources examined in interdisciplinary legal studies. Law and humanities enriches understanding of the human and experiential dimensions of justice through engagement with a variety of aesthetic discourses. The comics medium, however, remains under-researched in this context. Comics are distinct in their interaction of word and image, existing at the borderline between the textual and the visual, and between the rational and the aesthetic; they can thus assist in navigating the limits of rational language, a key issue for legal knowledge and debate which are deeply ingrained with this means of representation. The âin-betweennessâ of comics not only challenges the idealised use of text for the articulation of legal issues, but enables engagement with a wider set of interacting knowledges beyond the rational that can help triangulate issues surrounding justice in a human world inhabited by sensual beings
Anderson v Dredd [2137] Mega-City LR 1
Administrativeâjudgment on the nature of judgmentâconflict between Judges in judicial practiceâclaimant (Judge Anderson) challenges the judicial capacity of respondent (Judge Dredd)âclaimant open and fluid in judicial styleârespondent certain and authoritative in judicial styleâinsights from Psi Division on the role of judgment in the universeâwhether respondent is a good judgeâwhether judgment closes down meaningâwhether respondent is inhumanâwhether judges are inhumanâwhether judging is horrificâinsight from twentieth century fiction on the place of humans in the universeâhorror of HP Lovecraftâsuppression of horrific cosmic context within judicial institutionâsuppression for the good of society
A Roman face on an English body:the typography of Plowdenâs <i>Commentaries</i>
This paper examines the typographic form of Plowdenâs Commentaries within its legal, printing, and technological histories, demonstrating that its typographic appearance embeds complex tensions over the study and dissemination of the common law into its material form. There are legally relevant meanings in the shape of letters, beyond mere legibility, that are connected with the heritage of type design and print technologies. Within the context of debates over the propriety of early common law printing, this paper provides an examination of Plowdenâs typographic style as roman and humanist. Tracing the genealogy of roman and humanist letters that led to the ones used in Plowdenâs opening judgment, the typography of the Commentaries is connected to debates over the resistance of the common law (as an unwritten law) to humanism and Roman-style codification. Plowdenâs typographic register is thereby seen to encode the Latinate traditions to which the structure and custom of the English common law is opposed
Criminal Responsibility and the Living Self
Behaviour, including criminal behaviour, takes place in lived contexts of embodied action and experience. The way in which abstract models of selfhood efface the individual as a unique, living being is a central aspect of the âethical-otherâ debate; if an individual is modelled as abstracted from this âlivingâ context, that individual cannot be properly or meaningfully linked with his or her behaviour, and thus cannot justly be understood as responsible. The dominant rational choice models of criminal identity in legal theory involve at least a partial abstraction of this âunethicalâ type by prioritising the rational will over the more fluid dimensions of lived reality. From a phenomenological perspective, an approach of ârestlessnessâ is proposed which precludes the development of settled or general abstract categories, and can thus move us closer to an ethical understanding of living individuals on a theoretical level. Although such a move may initially seem to threaten criminal justice with an irrational nihilism, by maintaining awareness of the irreducibility of âlivingâ reality a restless theoretical understanding of moral selfhood may be able to shape or underpin the attribution of responsibility in more practical or substantive contexts without succumbing to meaninglessness
A Roman face on an English body:the typography of Plowdenâs <i>Commentaries</i>
This paper examines the typographic form of Plowdenâs Commentaries within its legal, printing, and technological histories, demonstrating that its typographic appearance embeds complex tensions over the study and dissemination of the common law into its material form. There are legally relevant meanings in the shape of letters, beyond mere legibility, that are connected with the heritage of type design and print technologies. Within the context of debates over the propriety of early common law printing, this paper provides an examination of Plowdenâs typographic style as roman and humanist. Tracing the genealogy of roman and humanist letters that led to the ones used in Plowdenâs opening judgment, the typography of the Commentaries is connected to debates over the resistance of the common law (as an unwritten law) to humanism and Roman-style codification. Plowdenâs typographic register is thereby seen to encode the Latinate traditions to which the structure and custom of the English common law is opposed
Comics, Crime, and the Moral Self: An Interdisciplinary Study of Criminal Identity
An ethical understanding of responsibility should entail a richly qualitative comprehension of the links between embodied, unique individuals and their lived realities of behaviour. Criminal responsibility theory broadly adheres to ârational choiceâ models of the moral self which subsume individualsâ emotionally embodied dimensions under the general direction of their rational will and abstracts their behaviour from corporeal reality. Linking individuals with their behaviour based only on such understandings of ârational choiceâ and abstract descriptions of behaviour overlooks the phenomenological dimensions of that behaviour and thus its moral significance as a lived experience. To overcome this ethical shortcoming, engagement with the aesthetic as an alternative discourse can help articulate the âexcessiveâ nature of lived reality and its relationship with âorthodoxâ knowledge; fittingly, the comics form involves interaction of rational, non-rational, linguistic, and non-linguistic dimensions, modelling the limits of conceptual thought in relation to complex reality. Rational choice is predicated upon a split between a contextually embedded self and an abstractly autonomous self. Analysis of the graphic novel Watchmen contends that prioritisation of rational autonomy over sensual experience is symptomatic of a ârational surfaceâ that turns away from the indeterminate âchaosâ of complex reality (the unstructured universe), instead maintaining the power of rational and linguistic concepts to order the world. This ârational surfaceâ is maintained by masking that which threatens its stability: the chaos of the infinite difference of living individuals. These epistemological foundations are reconfigured, via Watchmen, enabling engagement beyond the ârational surfaceâ by accepting the generative potential of this living chaos and calling for models of criminal identity that are ârestlessâ, acknowledging the unique, shifting nature of individuals, and not tending towards âcompleteâ or stable concepts of the self-as-responsible. As part of the aesthetic methodology of this reconfiguration, a radical extension of legal theoryâs analytical canon is developed
Natural Law and Vengeance:Jurisprudence on the Streets of Gotham
Batman is allied with modern natural law in the way he relies upon reason to bring about his vision of âtrue justiceâ, operating as a force external to law. This vision of justice is a protective one, with Batman existing as a guardianâa force for resistance against the corruption of the state and the failures of the legal system. But alongside his rational means, Batman also employs violence as he moves beyond the boundaries of the civilised state into the dark and violent world outside lawâs protection. He thus sacrifices his own safety to ensure the safety of othersâhe is a Dark Knight, a sentinel, fighting the nasty and brutish underworld of criminality in his effort to bring rational order to the world and protect the people of Gotham from criminal harm. This fight for justice is fuelled by a deeply private trauma: the murder of Bruce Wayneâs parents: a private desire for vengeance that Batman transcends. In navigating Batmanâs jurisprudential dimensions, we are ultimately reminded that private desires and motivations are enfolded within the public structures of justice
Practitioner accounts and knowledge production: an analysis of three marketing discourses
Responding to repeated calls for marketing academicians to connect with marketing actors, we offer an empirically-sourced discourse analysis of the ways in which managers portray their practices. Focusing on the micro-discourses and narratives that marketing actors draw upon to represent their work we argue that dominant representations of marketing knowledge production present a number of critical concerns for marketing theory and marketing education. We also evidence that the often promoted idea of a need to close the gap between theory - as a dominant discourse - and practice, as a way of doing marketing, is problematic to pursue. We suggest that a more fruitful agenda resides in the development of a range of polyphonic and creative micro-discourses of management, promoting context, difference and individual meaning in marketing knowledge production
Participatory politics, environmental journalism and newspaper campaigns
This is an Author's Accepted Manuscript of an article published in Journalism Studies, 13(2), 210 - 225, 2012, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/1461670X.2011.646398.This article explores the extent to which approaches to participatory politics might offer a more useful alternative to understanding the role of environmental journalism in a society where the old certainties have collapsed, only to be replaced by acute uncertainty. This uncertainty not only generates acute public anxiety about risks, it has also undermined confidence in the validity of long-standing premises about the ideal role of the media in society and journalistic professionalism. The consequence, this article argues, is that aspirations of objective reportage are outdated and ill-equipped to deal with many of the new risk stories environmental journalism covers. It is not a redrawing of boundaries that is needed but a wholesale relocation of our frameworks into approaches better suited to the socio-political conditions and uncertainties of late modernity. The exploration of participatory approaches is an attempt to suggest one way this might be done
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