Table Of ContentEnvisioning Legality
Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation brings together leading
scholars working at the intersection of law, representation, and visual culture.
Its wager is that the cultural representations which hold us in their thrall – from
Game of Thrones to The Dark Knight, The Oprah Winfrey Show to The Wire, war
photography to Inuit cinema – not only represent law, but constitute the ocular
and spectacular fabric of legality itself. The essays in this volume explore the
economies of looking, questions of genre that determine audience response, the
affective perspective of the spectator, and their psychic investments, as modes of
representational legality in which law is performed or enforced, and legal subjects
affectively constituted. In so doing they shed new light on key concerns of critical
legal scholarship, including law’s capacity to redress past wrongs, recognise and
combat injustices, and orient our communities in relation to uncertain futures.
Envisioning Legality thereby presents a Cultural Legal Studies that provides the
means for envisioning and reimagining law, legality and justice in a global, medi-
ated world.
Timothy D. Peters is a Senior Lecturer at USC Law School, University of the
Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia.
Karen Crawley is a Lecturer at Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Queens-
land, Australia.
Envisioning Legality
Law, Culture and Representation
Edited by Timothy D. Peters
and Karen Crawley
First published 2018
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2018 selection and editorial matter, Timothy D. Peters and
Karen Crawley; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Timothy D. Peters and Karen Crawley to be identified
as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for
their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
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or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and
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British Library Cataloguing- in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Names: Peters, Timothy D., editor. | Crawley, Karen, editor.
Title: Envisioning legality : law, culture and representation /
edited by Timothy D. Peters and Karen Crawley.
Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2018. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2017027140 | ISBN 9781138123762 (hbk)
Subjects: LCSH: Law and literature. | Law in motion pictures. |
Law on television. | Culture and law. | Sociological
jurisprudence.
Classification: LCC PN56.L33 E58 2018 | DDC
809/.933554—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017027140
ISBN: 978-1-138-12376-2 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-315-64863-7 (ebk)
Typeset in Galliard
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
List of figures vii
List of contributors viii
Acknowledgements xii
1 Introduction: ‘representational legality’ 1
KAREN CRAWLEY AND TIMOTHY D. PETERS
PART I
Spectacles of law and justice 19
2 I, archive: envisioning and programming digital legality
from Syfy’s Caprica 21
KIERAN TRANTER
3 Don’t blink: monstrous justice and the Weeping Angels of
Doctor Who 46
PENNY CROFTS
4 ‘Seeing’ justice done: envisioning legality in Christopher
Nolan’s The Dark Knight Trilogy 68
TIMOTHY D. PETERS
5 Machiavellian fantasy and the game of laws: rex, sex and lex
in George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire 96
WILLIAM P. MACNEIL
vi Contents
PART II
Juridical spectators 119
6 Ambivalence and the spectatorship of violence: viewing
Inglourious Basterds 121
ALISON YOUNG
7 Trench, trail, screen: scenes from the scopic regime
of sovereignty 140
DESMOND MANDERSON
8 The confessor: Oprah Winfrey, James Frey and the logic
of confession 161
KAREN CRAWLEY AND DESMOND MANDERSON
PART III
Scenes of legality 191
9 Legal unconsciousness: tragedy and melodrama in the
wake of terror 193
BONNIE HONIG
10 Mephistopheles in Hamsterdam: carnival and the state of
exception in HBO’s The Wire 210
EDWIN BIKUNDO
11 Intercultural cinema and the (re)envisioning of law:
exploring life, death and law in Atanarjuat and
Before Tomorrow 228
REBECCA JOHNSON
Index 253
Figures
2.1 Schematic of modern legality 35
2.2 Schematic of digital legality 36
7.1 Frank Hurley, Battle- Scarred Sentinels (1917) 144
7.2 Frank Hurley, Dawn (or Morning) at Passchendaele (1917) 146
7.3 Still from Damien Parer, Kokoda Front Line! 149
Contributors
Book editors
Dr Timothy D. Peters
Senior Lecturer, USC Law School, University of the Sunshine Coast, Queens-
land, Australia
Dr Peters is a Senior Lecturer at the USC Law School, University of the Sunshine
Coast, an Adjunct Research Fellow at the Law Futures Centre, Griffith Uni-
versity and is President of the Law, Literature and the Humanities Association
of Australasia. He holds an LLB, a Bachelor of Commerce and a PhD from
Griffith University, where he was a lecturer from 2011 to 2017. His research
explores the intersections of legal theory, theology and popular culture and
he is currently completing a book manuscript for Edinburgh University Press
with the working title A Theological Jurisprudence of Popular Cinema: Super-
heroes, Science Fictions and Fantasies of Modern Law. Timothy was a Managing
Editor of the Griffith Law Review (2012–2017) and Secretary of both the
Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia (2009–2016) and
Law and Society Association of Australia and New Zealand (2006–2016).
Dr Karen Crawley
Lecturer, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
Karen Crawley is a lecturer at the Griffith Law School and a Managing Editor
of the Australian Feminist Law Journal. She researches at the intersections
of law and aesthetics, drawing on literary theory, visual culture and critical
theory. She is a graduate of the University of Sydney, with Honours in English
Literature and Law, and did her postgraduate study at McGill University
(LLM and PhD). She serves on the board of the Law, Literature and Humani-
ties Association of Australasia.
Book contributors
Dr Edwin Bikundo
Senior Lecturer, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Queensland, Australia
Contributors ix
Edwin Bikundo is a Senior Lecturer at the Griffith University School of Law.
He has teaching and research interests in International and Comparative Law
as well as Legal Theory. A recent aspect of this research is: “Carl Schmitt
as a Subject and Object of International Criminal Law: Ethical Judgment in
Extremis” published in The International Criminal Law Review (2016): 216–
236. Before joining Griffith University, he was a doctoral student and then a
sessional member of the Law Faculty at the University of Sydney. Prior to that
he studied at the University of Pune in India, Utrecht University in the Neth-
erlands and at the Kenya School of Law. Edwin also practised as an Advocate
of the High Court of Kenya and taught at the Faculty of Law at the University
of Nairobi and the Faculty of Arts at Egerton University in Kenya.
Associate Professor Penny Crofts
Faculty of Law, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia
Penny Crofts is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Tech-
nology, Sydney. She conducts interdisciplinary research into the criminal law,
drawing on historical, literary, philosophical and empirical materials to critically
investigate its models of culpability and enforcement. She is the author of Wick-
edness and Crime: Laws of Homicide and Malice (London: Routledge, 2013).
Professor Bonnie Honig
Brown University, Providence, RI, USA and American Bar Foundation, Chicago,
USA
Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor at Brown University in the depart-
ments of Modern Culture and Media (MCM) and Political Science. She is also
Affiliate Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. Her
most recent books are Antigone, Interrupted (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2013) and Public Things: Democracy in Disrepair (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2017). She can be reached at [email protected]
Professor Rebecca Johnson
Faculty of Law, University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Rebecca Johnson is Professor at the Faculty of Law at the University of Victoria,
Canada, and Associate Director of the Indigenous Law Research Unit. Her work
centres the place of the cultural imaginary in the legal order. She has written on
such topics as same-sex family formation, colonialism, judicial dissent, affect and
emotion, mothers and babies in prison, cinematic violence, the Western, and Inuit
cinema. She has co-edited a special issue of the Canadian Journal of Women and
the Law on ‘Law, Film, and Feminism,’ and is currently working on the implemen-
tation of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s findings in legal education.
Professor William P. MacNeil
Dean & Head, School of Law & Justice, Southern Cross University, New South
Wales & Queensland, Australia
