Volume 9, Issue 2 -

Theatre and law are not so different. Generally, researchers work on the art of theatre, the rhetoric of the actors, or the dramaturgy built from law cases or from the questions that the law does not completely resolve. Trials, tragedies, even comedies are close: everybody can see the interpenetration of them on stage and in the courts. We know that, and we know that the dramas are made with/from/of law, we know that the art the actors are developing is not so far from the art of the lawyers, and conversely. In this paper, I would like to have a look at the action of the audience, at the session itself and at the way the spectators are here to evaluate and judge not only the dramatic action, not only the art of the actors, not only the text of the author, but also the other spectators, and themselves too. In particular, I will focus on the “common judgment” of the audience and on its judicial, aesthetic and social relationship. The spectators have been undisciplined, noisy, unruled, during such a long period that theatre still retains some prints of this behaviour, even if nowadays, the social and aesthetic rule is to be silent. But uncertainty, inattention, distraction, contradiction, heterogeneity are the notions which characterise the session, and the judgments of the spectators still depend on them. So, what was and what is the voice of the audience? And with what sort of voice do spectators give their judgments?

This article analyses five landmarks in totalitarian and dystopian fiction from a law-and-literature perspective, thus comparing works published between the 1920s and the first decade of the twenty-first century that fictionalize diametrically opposed ideologies of countries such as Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and the United States of America: Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize winning work Maus ; Philip Roth’s “dark, humane masterpiece” ( The Times ) of “faction,” The Plot Against America ; Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We , without which George Orwell’s modern classic Nineteen Eighty-Four would be unthinkable; and V for Vendetta by Alan Moore, one of the most acclaimed writers working in the graphic medium today.

In Julius Caesar the wounds on the body of the “king” are like mouths that cry out the condemnation of the violation of power and of a cosmic order. The divine body of the king has a sacred hue as he represents God on earth, thus the killing of Caesar can be connected to the killing of Christ. Caesar in the text has many Christological connotations. The killing of Caesar has the emblematic character of a cry against the violation of legitimate power: the body is at first concealed (Caesar’s mantel hides his corpse) then exhibited (when Antony uncovers it) and sacralized so as to make this catastrophe symbolic of an adhesion to legitimate power. Antony makes Caesar’s body the voice of power: on one hand it has the function of stressing the persuasive power of Antony’s words, on the other hand Antony transforms the body into a spiritual icon in order to reach his aim of denouncing the illegitimate subversion of the conspirators.

This essay aims at providing a critical glance on the legal “fault lines” between voice and silence; utterance and dumbness; disclosure and mystery; discernability and ambiguity. At a theoretical level, the arguments suggested intend to innovate the conventional discourse on legal traditions, focusing on their proper and complex morphosyntax. Specifically, the main purpose is to call forth the haunted ventriloquism which animates and informs legal traditions in order to disfigure the ideological image portrayed for a legitimating project. On this ground what is proposed is an original understanding of the politics of memories, conceived as the inner force, which codifies heterogeneous canons of commemoration. The poles of usual contrapositions (memory/forgetting; remembrance/silencing) are questioned and scrutinized; the multiple facets of the voices of memory and the silence of oblivion are taxonomically typified. The proposed paradigm is consequently applied to the particularities of the English Legal Tradition, emphasizing how the culture of legal revelling dramatized the ambiguities concealed in the speakable word of Law: on the one hand, the internal articulation of these sumptuous festivities, which structurally reflected the osmotic threshold between speech and faintness, utterance and dumbness; on the other, it has been noted that Revels made patent the meaningful silence implied in the proper other face of the conventional appearance of Law, that is in its suspension or in its exception. Conclusive remarks are devoted to analyse the nexus among word, interpretation, and violence in Robert Cover’s thought. In this perspective the essay debates on the silent sacrifice behind the supposed creative act of judicial interpretation and intellectually claims for a counter-resistant act of unveiling heterodoxy.

The core subject of The King’s Speech (Tom Hooper, 2010) is the relation between voice and power. In the first place, we have the speech impediment of the Duke of York (the future George VI) and his subsequent inability to deliver effectual messages to the nation in a particularly dramatic phase in history. This failure highlights, by contrast, the identification of monarchy with voice. The film actually shows how the performative power of speech became crucial after the invention of the wireless. The BBC, as George V stated on his death bed, had turned kings into actors: elocution could either make or unmake them. Yet, these are only some facets of the complex dynamics by which language and power are interrelated in the film. Another important issue is the form of verbal exchange between doctor and patient, which enacts a wavering between two kinds of authority, the one possessed by right (legitimate power) and the one acquired by study and experience (expert power). Emphasis is also placed on standard English as the language traditionally associated with higher education, political supremacy and prestige. The importance given to Received Pronunciation and the contempt shown towards other language variants proves how deeply embedded in language power is. Though amiably, even the ironic remarks on conversational rules made by Elizabeth, the future Queen Mother, finally confirm the status quo, putting things and people back into place on the social scale. This is also, ultimately, the policy of the BBC, the institution that has been invested with the task of preserving, at the same time, British national identity and the purity of the English language.

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 .

The aim of this paper is to investigate what we mean by “voice” in legal documents. Whose voice is speaking in a Constitution? Does a code of laws have a voice? And, above all, can a judge be said to be a “voice” of the law? As we shall see, this question of the voice speaking in a legal document, is not commonly afforded. Henceforth, we should make reference to literary theories to reappraise the meaning of legal documents from the standpoint of searching for the voice speaking in them. In this way, we shall try to envision a new approach to the legitimacy of reading in order to reframe the problematic relation between the judge as a reader and the texts. This point is of peculiar interest in the actual debate in the United States about the reading of the Constitution, and represents, also, a key factor in comparing different jurisdictions; it is a central point in comparative law and attempts to portray the Geography of the Nomos , through the “representation” of the various “legal voices” that unite, or divide, the different jurisdictional spaces of world governance.

How do voice and power connect, in law? More precisely: given that in many cases one of the parties to a dispute does not share the language or the code of the court, and that the verdict will therefore do violence to him (this is the meaning of “differend,” as distinct from an ordinary legal dispute), how do the voices of the victims speak? The aim of this paper is to develop, with the aid of numerous literary examples, a typology of the various modulations of these voices, all the way from silence up to a shout, taking in along the way such things as: delirious ramblings, the oratorio, the petition, and literary sublimation. What are the limits of the “literary corpus” which we have in mind here? What about all the documents produced by the victims in cases of differend? Can we not regard them as a form of “outsider art,” of “judicial style”?

The essay focusses on the employment relationship as a privileged perspective for the analysis of the binomial “power of voices/voices of power.” In such context, the right to strike is presented as a meaningful example of the power stemming from a collective organisation of voices, the voices of the workers, granted as a means to counter-balance the power and the voice of the employer. The analysis highlights the enduring relevance of the British perspective towards the topic, from the liberalist policies fostered by Prime Minister Thatcher in the Eighties until the critical approach recently adopted by the British Government with regard to the protection of the right to strike at international level. British filmography is chosen as a lens for observing such perspective, in particular to the extent it describes the impact of Thatcherism on the British model of industrial relations as well as the economic and social consequences of such political measures in the Nineties. After a general overview, aimed at highlighting common features across the films, like the pivotal role of music and dance in the storyline, the analysis focusses on Billy Elliot, examining the ambiguous relationship between the collective and individual dimension in its narration.

The tribunal plays produced at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn, North London have come to represent under many respects the hallmark of the new spate of documentary work on the British stage, often designated as “verbatim drama” in contemporary critical parlance. Expressly envisaged as theatrical interventions into the public sphere, these dramatizations of official public inquiries turn theatrical space into legal space, grounding their claims to veracity in the exact reproduction of the actually spoken. While crucial to their ontological authority, the self-imposed orthodoxy whereby the playwright is the mere editor of words recorded in inquiry transcripts has been put under considerable strain by the very topic that has played a central role in triggering and shaping the format, that of contemporary conflict. A considerable share of recent verbatim work deals with the war on terror, a war increasingly fought outside legal jurisdiction and hence a subject that has thrown into sharp relief the epistemological limits of a form of drama that is entirely dependent on the existence and availability of legal records. This essay looks at the strategies of “re-voicing” whereby Richard Norton-Taylor negotiates the strictures of the code in his tribunal play Bloody Sunday: Scenes from the Saville Inquiry (2005). By turning the spotlight on testimony as a conflicted practice, Norton-Taylor’s editorial perspective provides a scorching critique of the long-overdue official review of the tragic events in Derry on 30 January 1972, and at the same time manages to indirectly address some highly topical issues of legitimacy and legality raised by the intervention in Iraq.

This paper explores the production, destruction, and reproduction of the geopolitical spaces of Roman law in order to offer an analysis of Schmitt’s (selective) notion of Jus Publicum Europaeum and its relevance to the current “depoliticization” and “dejuridification” of the world. By adopting a historical and geopolitical approach that reaches the boundaries of legal systemology and political theology, the present contribution investigates the manipulative and instrumentalist use of the material object of Rome’s (universalist) competence, namely the “territory” as dominium of its political intervention, which was ultimately (and idealistically) aimed at avoiding the natural destiny of any living being: birth, maturity, and death. Attention is therefore paid to the Roman strategy of (ontological?) contamination of its mythical identity through the legal and sociopolitical administration and regulation of its geographical spaces in terms of (non-)cultural signification. Through the analysis of such concepts as “ nomos ,” “ Großraum ,” “ Ortung ,” and “ Ordnung ,” it is claimed that Schmitt voluntarily chose to identify the Jus Publicum Europaeum with the geopolitical order produced during the Age of Discovery and not with the “comprehensive” Roman spatial order. The reason for this choice may be identified in the distortive use of Rome’s social relations and political allegiances that lay at the core of its genealogical expansionism (and subsequent inevitable dissolution) since the conquest of Veius in 396 BC and the historical compromise between patrician nobility and plebeians in 367 BC.

Apuleius’ De Magia , or about magic, is the only extant court defence of his times, the second century CE. Whilst Apuleius most probably provided us with an expanded version of his actual speech, we can still enjoy the flavour of his witty and convincing plea. I will here consider the power of Apuleius’ voice in both his court speech and his other surviving works. Apuleius followed the attempts of Cicero and Seneca to recast Greek concepts and theories in Latin language and culture. These creative translations had a tremendous influence, for better or worse, on subsequent Western thought. However, Apuleius not only produced a compendium of Platonic doctrine, but he also renewed the tradition of Greek tales with his famous novel The Golden Ass . I will examine both texts, and I will underline the role of the neologism curiositas , that is curiosity, in the economy of the novel and in the more general Apuleian recasting of Platonism.