Law Courts and Procedure

Performing Law: Actors, Affects, Spaces

Edited by Peter Goodrich · Anna Jayne Kimmel · Meyler Bernadette Kimmel
New Arrival Cambridge University Press May 2026

Specifications

ISBN-13
9781009674201
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Publication
May 2026
Format
Hardback
Jurisdiction
U.K. ? Countri(es) for reference only

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The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from performance studies, theatre history, aesthetics, dance, film, history, and law provide critical analyses of the sites, dramas and stage directions to be found in the orchestration of the tragedies and comedies acted out in multiple forums of contemporary legality.

This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction
Peter Goodrich and Anna Kimmel

Part I. Forensis and Forensic Actors:
2. Law, rhetoric and fictionality in 'the age of theatre': a literary response to law as performance
Lorna Hutson
3. The poetics of hypokrisis in the early modern judicial theatre
Subha Mukherji
4. The outdoor stages of common law
Piyel Haldar
5. Law-text-performance
Derek Miller

Part II. Affectations:
6. On dialogue: or legal performance in the affective space
Jesus Velasco
7. Performing for the audience
Simon Stern
8. Desiring children: vulnerability and the sex offender
Jisha Menon

Part III. Transgressions:
9. The comediography of law
Goodrich
10. The force of laughter and a minor jurisprudence of refusal: A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982)
Başak Ertür
11. Oath taking and legal performance
Marco Wan
12. 'Naked Athena' and classical lines: Wayward aesthetics of the exposed body
Anna Jayne Kimmel
13. Coda / Cauda / Cado: what I learned from performing law or, thereby hangs a tail
Julie Stone Peters

Contributors
Index
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