Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road
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Fiona Macmillan
Fiona Macmillan is Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Roma Tre. Her research focuses on the intersection between copyright and authors’ rights and cultural property and heritage. This trajectory of this research implicates questions about the relationship between creativity, cultural production and forms of law. She is the Co-Director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property.
Abstract
Using Cormac McCarthy’s post-apocalyptic novel, The Road (2006) and its cinematographic transformation of the same name by John Hillcoat (2009), this essay explores the relationship between expressive autonomy and law as a form of political and social organization. The essay attempts to understand what it means to be “without law” and whether such an absence implicates some other organizing principle or concept. For this purpose, comparisons are drawn between Hillcoat’s version of The Road and his subsequent film Lawless (2012). In order to consider the relationship between lawlessness and expressive autonomy, the essay focuses on the significance of the balance between love, hope and fear, which it argues characterises the dystopic world of The Road.
About the author
Fiona Macmillan is Professor of Law at Birkbeck, University of London and Visiting Professor of Law at the University of Roma Tre. Her research focuses on the intersection between copyright and authors’ rights and cultural property and heritage. This trajectory of this research implicates questions about the relationship between creativity, cultural production and forms of law. She is the Co-Director of the International Society for the History and Theory of Intellectual Property.
©2015 by De Gruyter
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Voices of Power/Power of Voices
- Voices of Spectators and Audience Power
- “There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings
- Caesar’s Body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Sacralization and De-sacralization of Power
- Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions
- “What Is Royalty Without a Voice?” The Performance of Power in The King’s Speech
- Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road
- Voice, Incarnation and the United States Supreme Court
- Disputes and the Differend: Literary Strategies to Say the Unspeakable
- The Working Class Goes to the Movies: Labour Law and Thatcherism in British Films
- War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
- Research
- Legal Systemology and the Geopolitics of Roman Law: A Response to Stuart Elden’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Ontology
- Speech and Graphomena: The Power of Apuleius’ Words in Court and in Translation
- Book Review
- Mireille Hildebrandt and Jeanne Gaakeer: Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Focus
- Focus: Voices of Power/Power of Voices
- Voices of Spectators and Audience Power
- “There Were No Longer Any Laws”: Voices of Authority, Complicity, and Resistance in Totalitarian Dystopias and Holocaust Imaginings
- Caesar’s Body in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: Sacralization and De-sacralization of Power
- Legal Oracularism and Theological Prophetism. Fleshly Silences Across Memories and Traditions
- “What Is Royalty Without a Voice?” The Performance of Power in The King’s Speech
- Is There Voice Without Law? On The Road
- Voice, Incarnation and the United States Supreme Court
- Disputes and the Differend: Literary Strategies to Say the Unspeakable
- The Working Class Goes to the Movies: Labour Law and Thatcherism in British Films
- War in Words: The Tricycle Theatre’s Re-voicing of the Bloody Sunday Inquiry
- Research
- Legal Systemology and the Geopolitics of Roman Law: A Response to Stuart Elden’s Critique of Carl Schmitt’s Spatial Ontology
- Speech and Graphomena: The Power of Apuleius’ Words in Court and in Translation
- Book Review
- Mireille Hildebrandt and Jeanne Gaakeer: Human Law and Computer Law: Comparative Perspectives
