Melbourne Law School - Theses

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    Acoustic jurisprudence: listening to the trial of Simon Bikindi
    PARKER, JAMES ( 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.