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

by Julie Stone Peters

Overview

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: it must be "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, judges' chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and 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, in working to distinguish law from theatrics, defined the very nature of law. In the crucial opposition between law and theatre, 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780192898494
Publisher:	Oxford University Press
Publication date:	10/12/2022
Series:	Law and Literature
Pages:	368
Sales rank:	713,404
Product dimensions:	9.50(w) x 6.25(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Julie Stone Peters (B.A. Yale, Ph.D. Princeton, J.D. Columbia) is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Co-Chair of Columbia's Theatre and Performance PhD Program. She has taught at Harvard, Stanford, and the Metropolitan Detention Center (Brooklyn), was Founding Director of the Columbia College Human Rights Program, and has been the recipient of Guggenheim, NEH, Fulbright, ACLS, Humboldt, and other fellowships. Her publications include Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (Oxford University Press, 2000, winner of the Harry Levin and Beatrice White Prizes), Women's Rights, Human Rights: International Feminist Perspectives (co-edited, Routledge, 1995), and numerous studies of drama, performance, film, media, and the cultural history of law.

Table of Contents

Introduction1. Theatre, Theatrocracy, and the Politics of Pathos in the Athenian Lawcourt2. The Roman Advocate as Actor: Actio, Pronuntiatio, Prosopopoeia, and Persuasive Empathy in Cicero and Quintilian3. Courtroom Oratory, Forensic Delivery, and the Wayward Body in Medieval Rhetorical Theory4. Irreverent Performances, Heterodox Subjects, and the Unscripted Crowd from the Medieval Courtroom to the Stocks and Scaffold5. Performing Law in the Age of Theatre (c. 1500-1650)6. Legal Performance Education in Early Modern EnglandEpilogue

Editorial Reviews

"The volume, accompanied by an extensive bibliography and a final index of names and concepts, is well edited and easy to read...the book, thanks to the extensive number of citations and references with which it is shaped, is a masterful work in providing a comprehensive and convincing picture of the relationship between performance and law over many centuries." — Stefania Giombini, Autonomous University of Barcelona, translated from Bryn Mawr Classical Review

"Peters pursues the puzzle of law's vividae rationes, its speaking to the eye, with her characteristic erudition, analytic acuity and verbal verve. The long history of legal theatrics, of air filled with gestures, of the clamor of the pit, of costume, contumely and conflict here find their appositely dramatic inscription. Exhaustive and meticulous, the history of the myriad forms in which jurists have staged legal judgement takes on an urgent topicality as social media and its omnivoyant lenses fulminate the forensic forum into the viral voracity and extravagant exposure of an increasingly populist online public sphere. In sum and pestle, Law as Performance brilliantly transforms the cold gray Janus face of the jurist into the terpsichorean and tempestive figure of justice being done." — Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law, Director of the Program in Law and Humanities, Cardozo Law School

"In this extraordinarily detailed study, Julie Stone Peters lays out the rich tradition of lawyerly performance and establishes in an entirely persuasive manner the uneasy, tension-filled and yet symbiotic relationship between law's desire to inhabit a cool rational center and the inevitable eruption of eloquence and emotion in the services of causes both noble and savage. A fine achievement." — Stanley Fish, Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and Law, Florida International University, author of Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution (2014), How Milton Works (2001), and Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies (1989)

"In this fascinating and elegantly written monograph, Julie Stone Peters explores the theatricality of trials and punishments in ancient, medieval, and Early Modern Europe. She profoundly interrogates the somewhat Whiggish notion that one can draw a clear line between justice and the performance of the law, let alone that there is an increasing dissonance between the two as England entered modernity. This is wonderful history, not only because of the deftness of its arguments but also because of the rich anecdotal detail that enlivens nearly every page. Legal studies have been well served by this marvelous book." — William Chester Jordan, Dayton-Stockton Professor of History, Princeton University, author of From England to France: Felony and Exile in the High Middle Ages (2015) and Europe in the High Middle Ages (2001)

"The jury is in: with compelling scholarship that matches evidence and argument across 2,000 years of legal rhetorical practice, Julie Stone Peters proves that the continuities of law as performance are as startling as the changes, and she dramatizes how theatricality and anti-theatricality plead their cases before the bar of Janus-faced Lady Justice with adversarial vehemence and at times shocking irreverence." — Joseph Roach, Sterling Professor of Theater, Professor of English and African-American Studies, Yale University, author of it (2007), Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), and The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1993)

"To make authority requires being seen as having the capacity to call the disobedient to account. As Julie Stone Peters brilliantly excavates in her analysis of the 'performance of law' in literary and legal accounts, the audience regularly took center stage. This volume is a treasure trove of ideas and images illuminating the interwoven fabric of courts and theater, as both genres are dependent on spectatorship for their vitality." — Judith Resnik, Arthur Liman Professor of Law, and Dennis Curtis, Professor Emeritus of Law, Yale University, co-authors of Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (2011)

"The book has great significance, not only for discussing the role of jurisprudence and the production of law, it is also important for those working on history of legal jurisprudence beyond the confines of law as a set of rules, doctrines and concepts...it is important for various disciplines like history, European studies and language and literature." — Fulera Issaka-Toure, Legal Pluralism and Critical Social Analysis

"This wonderfully kaleidoscopic collection of thematic essays reveals hidden doors to various legal cultures. Peters has woven together the history of procedural law, rhetoric, theatre, the development of legal professions and legal iconography into the rich canvas of her highly original book. This indicates that scholars from many disciplines will find the book to be of interest." — Mia Korpiola, Mirator 23:1

"Law is everywhere and all around us... Her book offers both a history and jurisprudential-or legal philosophical-rethinking of the opacity of lawyers' law, drawing on her field of performance studies to return law to a world of visibility." — Marett Leiboff, Journal of Social History

"Law and Performance is itself a bravura performance, to which future scholars will return as both a treasure trove and a model for imitation." — Raphael Magarik, Modern Philosophy

"This book could mark the beginning of a theoretical renewal of legal history." — Rechtsgeschichte - Legal History

"Law and Performance is itself a bravura performance, to which future scholars will return as both a treasure trove and a model for imitation." — Raphael Magarik, Modern Philosophy

From the Publisher