DOING THEATRICAL JURISPRUDENCE
Publication Name
The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies
Abstract
This chapter takes us into the most bodily of cultural legal studies genres-theatrical jurisprudence. While this new field has burgeoned into an exciting array of scholarship, this chapter operationalises the practices of theatrical jurisprudence posed in Towards a Theatrical Jurisprudence (2019). It begins by marking out some of the key features of the transgressive form of theatrical jurisprudence I posed there, before marking out how the lifeworlds we hold in our bodies act on us even before we begin to engage in legal reasoning and interpretation. Theatrical jurisprudence identifies this as a practice of the body, not of the mind, first and foremost. For this reason, unless we are challenged to see how much it affects our reading, arguing, and shaping law, it is almost impossible to register the work our body does to condition our rational, thinking mind. To find out just how bodily our responses really are, I will take you into a set of theatre games and workshops that take us into parts of law we are usually taught to ignore, working with the 2010 UK case of Radmacher-not by reading the judgment but by watching the judges as captured by in-court cameras that reveal so much more than words can alone, showing just what really animated some of the judges, before turning this back on ourselves as readers, as a theatrical challenge to ourselves, of what is held in our own bodies.
Open Access Status
This publication is not available as open access
First Page
352
Last Page
366