STAGING THE JUDICIAL FIGURE: The Parallels Between Legal and Operatic Interpreters
Publication Name
The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies
Abstract
Throughout its history, the staging of opera has seen an exchange between tradition and innovation. That exchange resonates strongly with the history of legal interpretation, and polarising judicial figures in particular. Conventional understanding of individual judges and their jurisprudence is often confined to an account of judicial methodology. Operatic production, both traditional and innovative, crosses large expanses of time and space regardless of whether the operas themselves were originally produced in Europe. As such, using opera production as an extension of ‘law around opera’ studies can offer a new dialogue or conversation between law and opera in different times and places. In doing so, a specific use of operatic staging or productions is revealing. By studying these productions, which have been by turns standard or challenging, a new and dynamic way of understanding the contributions of the individual judge to law can emerge. In this chapter, I bring together Patrice Chéreau’s 1976 centennial production of Richard Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen together with Justice Lionel Murphy’s dissenting judgment in McInnis v The Queen (1979) 143 CLR 575. This production provides a powerful tool that I use in highlighting Justice Murphy’s critique of the injustices of the law’s dominant and traditional assumptions about the rights of an accused.
Open Access Status
This publication is not available as open access
First Page
269
Last Page
284