Law, Spectacle, and the Play of Jurisdiction

This book offers a critical reconsideration of the theatrical nature of jurisdiction, as it examines how legal proceedings are regularly framed by or turned into a public spectacle.

In legal cases, all those involved must play their parts, according to the rules, on a stage that is open to public scrutiny. As this book demonstrates, however, the affordances offered by new media, in a society spellbound by spectacle and embroiled in the polarization that accompanies it, can easily disrupt the theatrical nature of the court case. The book is divided into two parts. In Part 1, cases – from the Netherlands, the United States, Italy, Brazil, India, Germany, and Russia – show how populists, insurgents, corporations, and states play the judiciary by probing its limits or the rules of the game, often by twisting the proper intent of legal regulation or by formally making a farce of jurisdiction. In Part 2, the chapters deal with weaknesses in the theatrical nature of the judiciary in a time of spectacle. Here, the central issue is how the judiciary is threatened by dramatic forms of excess: forms that exceed the frame and stage of jurisdiction’s own theatricality. Bringing cultural analysis and play studies in conversation with legal analysis and legal philosophy, the book shows how the theatrical nature of the judiciary is more and more challenged by the force of the spectacular, and with it a strategic and tactically malevolent play of powerful actors that fragments collective feelings for justice, and instrumentalizes the law in the service of particular interests.

Law, Spectacle, and the Play of Jurisdiction will appeal to scholars and students in legal theory, law and literature, and others with relevant interests in politics, media, theatre and cultural studies.