Julie Stone Peters, the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, has published Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press):
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, but 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. 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 a crucial opposition, 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.
Here are some endorsements:
“In this extraordinarily detailed study, Peters establishes the symbiotic relationship between law’s desire to inhabit a cool center and the inevitable eruption of eloquence and emotion in the service of causes both noble and savage. A fine achievement.” -Stanley Fish, FIU College of Law
“Peters pursues the puzzle of law’s vividae rationes with her characteristic erudition, analytic acuity and verbal verve. Exhaustive and meticulous, Law as Performance brilliantly transforms the cold gray face of the jurist into the terpsichorean figure of justice being done.” -Peter Goodrich, Cardozo Law School
“Rich anecdotal detail enlivens nearly every page.” -William Chester Jordan, Princeton University
“This volume is a treasure trove of ideas and images.” -Judith Resnik, Yale University
--Dan Ernst
