Bøker i Discourses of Law-serien

Features an anthology designed to provide legal and socio-legal scholars with a sense of the wide range of projects and questions.

Brings an inter-jurisdictional dimension to the field of indigenous jurisprudence: comparing Indigenous legal regimes in New Zealand, the USA and Australia. This title offers a 'dialogical encounter with an Indigenous jurisprudence' in which individuals are characterised by their rights and responsibilities into the Land.

Dealing with the complex case law concerning the use of the provocation defence in cases of intimate killings, this title considers the construction and representation of subjectivity and sexual difference in legal narrations of homicide.

Addresses a fresh perspective on normativity opened up by Shakespeare's stage, as a visible space between the spheres of politics and law.

The Scene of the Mass Crime takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genocide? What do the trials actually show? What form of justice is done, and how does it relate to ordinary courts and proceedings? What lessons can be drawn from this history for the very topical political issue of filming civil and criminal trials? This book takes up the diversity and complexity of these idiosyncratic and, in strict terms, generally extra-legal medial situations. Drawing on a fascinating diversity of public trials and filmic responses, from the Trial of the Gang of Four to the Gacaca local courts of Rwanda to the filmic symbolism of 9-11, from Soviet era show trials to Nazi People''s Courts leading international scholars address the theatrical, political, filmic and symbolic importance of show trials in making history, legitimating regimes and, most surprising of all, in attempting to heal trauma through law and through film. These essays will be of considerable interest to those working on international criminal law, transitional justice, genocide studies, and the relationship between law and film.

The Scene of the Mass Crime takes up the unwritten history of the peculiar yet highly visible form of war crimes trials. These trials are the first and continuing site of the interface of law, history and film. From Nuremberg to the contemporary trials in Cambodia, film, in particular, has been crucial both as evidence of atrocity and as the means of publicizing the proceedings. But what does film bring to justice? Can law successfully address war crimes, atrocities, genocide? What do the trials actually show? What form of justice is done, and how does it relate to ordinary courts and proceedings? What lessons can be drawn from this history for the very topical political issue of filming civil and criminal trials? This book takes up the diversity and complexity of these idiosyncratic and, in strict terms, generally extra-legal medial situations. Drawing on a fascinating diversity of public trials and filmic responses, from the Trial of the Gang of Four to the Gacaca local courts of Rwanda to the filmic symbolism of 9-11, from Soviet era show trials to Nazi People''s Courts leading international scholars address the theatrical, political, filmic and symbolic importance of show trials in making history, legitimating regimes and, most surprising of all, in attempting to heal trauma through law and through film. These essays will be of considerable interest to those working on international criminal law, transitional justice, genocide studies, and the relationship between law and film.

In response to the rise of administrative rationality, this book draws on history, social anthropology and political theology, to examine the current crisis of faith in the legal and political constitutional imagination. An important body of law and society research has helped move jurisprudence beyond legal formalism. While the debt of law to more fundamental social and political phenomena has been established, the link between contemporary thinking of society, politics and law to pre-modern philosophical and religious metaphysics was and is still denied both by formalists and anti-formalist realists promoting the rise of social sciences in law. This book contests the premises of such secular optimism, arguing that modern constitutionality still involves legal and political values, rights entitlements and social formations that reflect the particular metaphysical postulates of a bygone era. Even as the constitution of world society is widely described as the result of fragmented and impersonal processes, the occidental fantasy of a sovereign power remains operative. Succinctly ΓÇô and through a close reading of developments in crisis-stricken Greece and beyond ΓÇô Marinos Diamantides maintains that the totalizing idea of an absolute but relational power of self-constitution applicable everywhere is the result, not of discarding but, attributing to man, the power of God. Forging a new vocabulary and new instruments by which to understand and respond to various crises in the contemporary state form, this book will be of enormous interest to scholars, students and others with an interest in current legal and political theory.

Addressing the relationship between law and the visual, this book examines the importance of photography in Central, East, and Southeast European show trials.The dispensation of justice during communist rule in Albania, East Germany, and Poland was reliant on legal propaganda, making the visual a fundamental part of the legitimacy of the law. Analysing photographs of trials, this book examines how this message was conveyed to audiences watching and participating in the spectacle of show trials. The book traces how this use of the visual was exported from the Soviet Union and imposed upon its satellite states in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. It shows how the legal actors and political authorities embraced new photographic technologies to advance their legal propaganda and legal photography. Drawing on contemporary theoretical work in the area, the book then challenges straightforward accounts of the relationship between law and the visual, critically engaging entrenched legal historical narratives, in relation to three different protagonists, to offer the possibility of reclaiming and rewriting past accounts. As its analysis demonstrates, the power of images can also be subversive; and, as such, the cases it addresses contribute to the discourse on visual epistemology and open onto contemporary questions about law and its inherent performativity.This original and insightful engagement with the relationship between law and the visual will appeal to legal and cultural theorists, as well as those with more specific interests in Stalinism, and in Central, East, and Southeast European history.