Envisioning Legality

Envisioning Legality
Author: Timothy Peters
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2017-11-22
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1317301595

Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation is a path-breaking collection of some of the world’s leading cultural legal scholars addressing issues of law, representation and the image. Law is constituted in and through the representations that hold us in their thrall, and this book focuses on the ways in which cultural legal representations not only reflect or contribute to an understanding of law, but constitute the very fabric of legality itself. As such, each of these ‘readings’ of cultural texts takes seriously the cultural as a mode of envisioning, constituting and critiquing the law. And the theoretically sophisticated approaches utilised here encompass more than simply an engagement with ‘harmless entertainment’. Rather they enact and undertake specific political and critical engagements with timely issues, such as: the redressing of past wrongs; recognising and combatting structural injustices; and orienting our political communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a cultural legal studies that provides the means for engaging in robust, sustained and in-depth encounters with the nature and role of law in a global, mediated world.

Imagining Legality

Imagining Legality
Author: Austin Sarat
Publisher: University of Alabama Press
Total Pages: 248
Release: 2011-09-12
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0817356789

Imagining Legality: Where Law Meets Popular Culture is collection of essays on the relationship between law and popular culture that posits, in addition to the concepts of law in the books and law in action, a third concept of law in the image—that is, of law as it is perceived by the public through the lens of public media. Imagining Legality argues that images of law suggested by television and film are as numerous as they are various, and that they give rise to a potent and pervasive imaginative life of the law. The media’s projections of the legal system remind us not only of the way law lives in our imagination but also of the contingencies of our own legal and social arrangements. Contributors to Imagining Legality are less interested in the accuracy of the portrayals of law in film and television than in exploring the conditions of law’s representation, circulation, and consumption in those media. In the same way that legal scholars have taken on the disciplinary perspectives of history, economics, sociology, anthropology, and psychology in relation to the law, these writers bring historical, sociological, and cultural analysis, as well as legal theory, to aid in the understanding of law and popular culture.

Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education

Biopolitics and Resistance in Legal Education
Author: Thomas Giddens
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 182
Release: 2023-06-30
Genre: Law
ISBN: 100087656X

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of resistance in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure—and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores the resistance to that structure, including: different ways in which law’s pedagogic structures might be incomplete, or are being fought against; the use of less conventional elements of cultural discourse to resist the abstraction of the lawyer in students’ subject formation; the centralisation of queer and feminist discourses to disrupt the hierarchies of the legal curriculum; the use of digital technologies; the place of embodiment in legal education settings; and the impacts of posthuman knowledges and contexts on legal learning. Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars and emerging researchers, this book constitutes an indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

Law, Lawyers and Justice

Law, Lawyers and Justice
Author: Kim D Weinert
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2020-04-01
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1000048039

This book engages with the place of law and legality within Australia’s distinctive contribution to global televisual culture. Australian popular culture has created a lasting legacy – for good or bad – of representations of law, lawyers and justice ‘down under’. Within films and television of striking landscapes, peopled with heroes, antiheroes, survivors and jokers, there is a fixation on law, conflicts between legal orders, brutal violence and survival. Deeply compromised by the ongoing violence against the lives and laws of First Nation Australians, Australian film and television has sharply illuminated what it means to live with a ‘rule of law’ that rules with a legacy, and a reality, of deep injustice. This book is the first to bring together scholars to reflect on, and critically engage with, the representations and global implications of law, lawyers and justice captured through the lenses of Australian film, television and social media. Exploring how distinctively Australian lenses capture uniquely Australian images and narratives, the book nevertheless engages these in order to provide broader insights into the contemporary translations and transmogrifications of law and justice.

Law, Culture and the Figure of the Girl

Law, Culture and the Figure of the Girl
Author: Honni van Rijswijk
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 144
Release: 2024-11-18
Genre: Law
ISBN: 0429558708

This book argues for the critical potential of locating the girl as the subject-position and voice of legal critique. Law’s imaginary is notoriously limited in its ways of thinking through and adjudicating gender violence. This book argues that ‘the girl’ is a key figure through which to understand, theorise, and challenge law’s relation to this violence. Law, Culture and the Figure of the Girl explains the meaning and significance of the figure of the girl to legal, political, and critical projects centred on trauma and responsibility. The book offers new readings of exemplary cultural texts that thematically deal with law’s adjudication of violence against girls, emphasising the ways these texts challenge dominant ways of thinking and doing law, jurisdiction, violence, race, and gender. The book also explores radical cultural figurations of the girl in fiction, films, and TV series and demonstrates the critical potential of these works in understanding and providing counter-narratives to dominant legal and cultural imaginaries. These works provide ways not only to critique existing law but to theorise emergent forms of law-making. This book will be of interest to scholars in the areas of cultural legal studies, law and literature, feminist legal studies, and cultural studies. It will also be suitable as a prescribed text for upper undergraduate classes and graduate studies in the disciplines of law, legal studies, cultural studies, and criminology.

The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies

The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies
Author: Karen Crawley
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 562
Release: 2024-05-20
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1040013287

This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the cutting-edge field of cultural legal studies. Cultural legal studies is at the forefront of the legal discipline, questioning not only doctrine or social context, but how the concerns of legality are distributed and encountered through a range of material forms. Growing out of the interdisciplinary turn in critical legal studies and jurisprudence that took place in the latter quarter of the 20th century, cultural legal studies exists at the intersection of a range of traditional disciplinary areas: legal studies, cultural studies, literary studies, jurisprudence, media studies, critical theory, history, and philosophy. It is an area of study that is characterised by an expanded or open-ended conception of what ‘counts’ as a legal source, and that is concerned with questions of authority, legitimacy, and interpretation across a wide range of cultural artefacts. Including a mixture of established and new authors in the area, this handbook brings together a complex set of perspectives that are representative of the current field, but which also address its methods, assumptions, limitations, and possible futures. Establishing the significance of the cultural for understanding law, as well as its importance as a potential site for justice, community, and sociality in the world today, this handbook is a key reference point both for those working in the cultural legal context – in legal theory, law and literature, law and film/television, law and aesthetics, cultural studies, and the humanities generally – as well as others interested in the interactions between authority, culture, and meaning.

Ways of Remembering: Volume 1

Ways of Remembering: Volume 1
Author: Oishik Sircar
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 364
Release: 2024-05-31
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1009281925

Ways of Remembering tells a story about the relationship between secular law and religious violence by studying the memorialisation of the 2002 Gujarat pogrom—postcolonial India's most litigated and mediatized event of anti-Muslim mass violence. By reading judgments and films on the pogrom through a novel interpretive framework, the book argues that the shared narrative of law and cinema engenders ways of remembering the pogrom in which the rationality of secular law offers a resolution to the irrationality of religious violence. In the public's collective memory, the force of this rationality simultaneously condemns and normalises violence against Muslims while exonerating secular law from its role in enabling the pogrom, thus keeping the violent (legal) order against India's Muslim citizens intact. The book contends that in foregrounding law's aesthetic dimensions we see the discursive ways in which secular law organizes violence and presents itself as the panacea for that very violence.

Critical Directions in Comics Studies

Critical Directions in Comics Studies
Author: Thomas Giddens
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 323
Release: 2020-08-25
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1496829034

Contributions by Paul Fisher Davies, Lisa DeTora, Yasemin J. Erden, Adam Gearey, Thomas Giddens, Peter Goodrich, Maggie Gray, Matthew J. A. Green, Vladislav Maksimov, Timothy D. Peters, Christopher Pizzino, Nicola Streeten, and Lydia Wysocki Recent decades have seen comics studies blossom, but within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root—assumptions around the particular methods used to approach the comics form, the ways we should read comics, how its “system” works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish. These approaches question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. In this edited collection, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine comics by addressing materiality and form as well as the wider economic and political contexts of comics’ creation and reception. Through this lens, influenced by poststructuralist theories, contributors explore and elaborate other possibilities for working with comics as a critical resource, consolidating the emergence of these alternative modes of engagement in a single text. This opens comics studies to a wider array of resources, perspectives, and modes of engagement. Included in this volume are essays on a range of comics and illustrations as well as considerations of such popular comics as Deadpool, Daredevil, and V for Vendetta, and analyses of comics production, medical illustrations, and original comics. Some contributions even unfold in the form of comics panels.

Hashtag Jurisprudence

Hashtag Jurisprudence
Author: Sharp, Cassandra
Publisher: Edward Elgar Publishing
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2022-02-11
Genre: Law
ISBN: 1800372590

This thoroughly engaging book uses empirical analysis to illustrate that the response of individuals to global terror events, via social media, provokes an opportunity to interpret the ways in which individuals view their place in the world and their relation to law and justice. It is through analysing these responses that Cassandra Sharp demonstrates that a ‘hashtag jurisprudence’ can be constructed.