Law and Politics of Rule of Law Performances

Abstract

My haste may not admit it;Nor need you, on mine honour, have to do With any scruple; your scope is as mine own So to enforce or qualify the laws As to your soul seems good. Give me your hand: I'll privily away. I love the people, But do not like to stage me to their eyes -Measure for Measure, I. i. 72-78Previous chapters have traced how what I have called ignorance and implementation work shape rule of law reform within the mundane moments of projects and policymaking. In this chapter, I provide further develop ideas about ignorance and implementation work that might be applied to rule of law reform and expert ignorance more generally.I begin with a brief analytic interlude. I return to Measure for Measure, thus far an allusive companion to the manuscript. In this chapter, I provide a reading of it that emphasises its staging of governors and government. Duke Vincentio the 'old fantastical duke of dark corners' who has temporarily stepped down from his sovereign seat in Vienna to wander disguised among his citizens, is a governor whose governing power emerges from his ability to manipulate the form of dramatic action and shift the genre and plot of the play. The play thus operates as a shortcut to a performance analysis of the operations and effects of self-denying governors in general.The genre and plot are notoriously hard to study -Harold Bloom describes the play as 'rancid' 1 -as it moves between tragedy, comedy, and romance, between allegory and historical representation. In my view, the play stages the law of Vienna and does so as no more and no less than the accumulated actions and machinations of the Duke as well as other 5