Melbourne Law School - Theses
Permanent URI for this collection
Search Results
1 - 2 of 2
-
ItemA Theatrical Jurisprudence of Repair( 2023-06)This thesis explores the capacity of law to conduct repair, through learning from acts of legal dissent. I argue that we can better understand the jurisprudential significance of a set of dissenting acts against the colonial sodomy law in India by describing them as activities of repair. The sodomy law, which was enacted in 1860 and struck down by the Indian Supreme Court in 2018, criminalised the intimate lives of queer persons. The dissenting acts that I follow turn away from the sodomy law, staging alternative worlds which allow us to imagine ways of living differently with law. The worlds that they stage are lawful: they are constructed using minor forms and techniques of law. Some of these queer dissidents explicitly use and rework what we might understand as more conventional legal forms: the form of a contract, the form of an affidavit, the form of a judgment. In other instances, they rely upon a form that might not be conventionally understood as a legal form, such as theatre. I start by suggesting that each of these actors offers us a different way of conducting repair. The colonial sodomy law impairs the ability of queer persons in India to forge lawful relations. The acts of dissent that I describe attempt to repair this damage through relying on law’s forms and techniques. Law is the thing that breaks; laws are also the things that are used to remake. Repair allows us to watch and describe how this work of remaking might be done. It also allows us to consider an element of creativity involved in these acts of dissent: things are re-paired, they are paired differently, to create new resources that allow for different ways of living with law. I find my vocabulary of repair by first turning to the US American queer theorist Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick. In her work, Sedgwick names a reparative impulse through paying attention to the ways in which queer people attempt to extract sustenance from the objects of a culture whose avowed desire has often been to not sustain them. I identify a number of training exercises through which Sedgwick attempts to practice this impulse in her own writings. In my first chapter, I draw out these exercises as part of Sedgwick’s ethos. Given that Sedgwick does not have an account of law, I then place these training exercises in relation with a set of writings by US American law and humanities scholars: James Boyd White, Robert Cover, and Patricia Williams. These latter texts are also acts of dissent, in this case against the conventions of legal-theoretical writing. The dissenting writers that I follow turn away from styles of critical scholarship that they find constraining, practicing forms of writing that creatively hold the descriptive work of their enquiry. In doing so, I find that each of these writers offers different kinds of training in repair-work. My thesis proceeds by pairing a different act of queer dissent against the sodomy law in India with the teachings of different sets of US American reparative writers. These pairings are ordered through a particular idiom that anchors each chapter: dramaturgy, attachment, translation, voice, and pedagogy. These idioms allow me to pay attention to a distinct aspect of reparative jurisprudence in each chapter: the staging of reparative dissent (Chapter Two: Dramaturgy); the love for law that might animate reparative dissent (Chapter Three: Attachment); how this love might inhibit ways of listening to dissent and consequently require us to practice an art of recognition and response (Chapter Four: Translation); how writing in a borrowed voice might allow us to practice legal criticism differently (Chapter Five: Voice); and how pedagogy might serve as a means of teaching and transmitting reparative dissent (Chapter Six: Pedagogy). By staging my chapters and inflecting my idioms in this manner, I write within the field of theatrical jurisprudence. Theatrical jurisprudence is characterised by its practitioners’ usage of techniques and practices influenced by theatre and performance to enliven law. In the process, theatrical jurisprudents draw attention to how law is staged - and how it might be staged differently. Writing with the resources offered by this field allows me to pay attention to how my cast of dissenters go about their dissent, and allows their voices, styles, and genres to guide my own writing.
-
ItemAcoustic jurisprudence: listening to the trial of Simon Bikindi( 2013)Sound is a fact of life. It is not a fact, however, that contemporary legal scholarship has made any particular efforts to acknowledge, let alone to interrogate in any depth. As a community of jurists we have become deaf to law and to the problem of the acoustic. We must begin to take responsibility for a dimension of legal thought and practice that is no less real or significant simply because we barely attend to it. This thesis argues, therefore, for a specifically acoustic jurisprudence. It proceeds by means of a case study. Between September 2006 and December 2008, Simon Bikindi stood trial at the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda in Arusha, Tanzania, accused of inciting genocide with his songs. My analysis of the Bikindi case is pursued according to two main axes. First, the Tribunal’s ‘sonic imagination’: how it thought about matters of acoustics for the purposes of judgment. Second, the ‘judicial soundscape’: the Tribunal’s own acoustics, how sound operated in the courtroom, what work it did, how it was used, ignored, co-opted or otherwise perceived. Each of these two lines of inquiry is further divided into three parts, on the topics of song, speech and sound respectively. I demonstrate how the ICTR drew on, reproduced and gave juridical shape to a whole range of familiar ways of imagining sound in its various forms. And I show how, even though the Tribunal was not always insensitive to matters of acoustics, its approach to Bikindi’s songs displayed an acute form of legal deafness: a real misunderstanding of how songs work, what they do and why they are important. Although the thesis takes the Bikindi case as its main site of analysis, its most important implications are intended to be much broader. Most of all, it is addressed to a gap in the extant literature on the formal, aesthetic and material dimensions of legal practice. Drawing on the jurisprudential literature into which it inserts itself, the emergent field of sound studies and a theological and metaphysical tradition which extends back at least as far back as Ancient Greece, it is both an argument for the importance of attending to questions of sound in law and a first exemplification of what it might mean to do so.