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Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe

Online ISBN:
9780191924774
Print ISBN:
9780192898494
Publisher:
Oxford University Press
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Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe

Julie Stone Peters
Julie Stone Peters
H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature, Columbia University
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Published online:
21 April 2022
Published in print:
28 April 2022
Online ISBN:
9780191924774
Print ISBN:
9780192898494
Publisher:
Oxford University Press

Abstract

Tirades against legal theatrics are nearly as old as law itself, and yet so is the age-old claim that law must not merely be done, but “seen to be done.” Law as Performance traces the history of legal performance and spectatorship through the early modern period. Viewing law as the product not merely of edicts or doctrines but of expressive action, it investigates the performances that literally created law: in civic arenas, courtrooms, and judges’ chambers; on scaffolds; and in the streets. It examines the legal codes, learned treatises, trial reports, lawyers’ manuals, execution narratives, rhetoric books, images (and more) that confronted these performances, praising their virtues or denouncing their evils. In so doing, it recovers a long, rich, and largely overlooked tradition of jurisprudential thought about law as a performance practice. This tradition not only generated an elaborate poetics and politics of legal performance. It provided western jurisprudence with a set of constitutive norms that shaped the very identity of law. That identity emerged, in part, through an opposition: law stood for cool deliberation, by-the-book rules, and sovereign discipline; theatre stood for deceptive artifice, entertainment, histrionics, melodrama. And yet legal performance, even at its most theatrical, also appeared fundamental to law’s realization—a central mechanism for shaping legal subjects, key to persuasion, essential to deterrence, indispensable to law’s power—as it still does today.

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