Legal Performance Good and Bad

Abstract

“Performance” and “performativity” have become central terms in the discussion of legal identity over the past decade or two, and “performance” and “theatricality” figure in a number of theoretical writings on law. This essay reviews these discussions, looking at the ways in which they construe legal performance and assessing what they have to say about its nature, meaning, and consequences for the law. Diagnosing a split in the critical literature between a vision of legal theatricality endemically complicit with the law's authoritarian control of the subject and a vision of it as an agent of liberation from authoritarian subjugation, I identity this split with a longer history of ambivalence about the theatricality of the law. On the one hand, this essay is simply a map of what has been said in the past few decades about legal performance. On the other, it serves as a critical introduction to a longer-term study of the role of legal performance (as both instrument and concept) in the historical production and reception of the law.

The Hybrid Legal Geographies of a War Crimes Court

“…The observation that war crimes trials create senses of disempowerment and retraumatization among those testifying reflects wider legal scholarship concerning the psychological impacts of bearing witness (Peters 2008;Orentlicher 2010). There are, however, a series of conceptual and spatial implications that stem from such an embodied analysis of legal performance at the CBiH.…”

A New Framework for Evaluating the Potential for Drug Law to Produce Stigma: Insights from an Australian Study

“…50 In this sense, identities are "not natural entities, but may be created, and recreated" through processes of repetition. 51 This means that ontology is itself repetition. 52 Performativity theory has been influential in several disciplines, including feminism, queer theory and economics.…”

Disentangling Law: The Practice of Bracketing

“…This is so in a foundational sense. The construction of that which is deemed law rests on the definition of a violent world of nonlaw (Peters 2008). This is evident in relation to tropes relating to legal violence (Blomley 2003) in which law's violence-rational, regulated, advancing common goals-is separated from and imagined as a counter to the "anomic or sectarian savagery beyond law's boundaries" (Sarat & Kearns 1992, p. 5).…”