The 2023 Cotterrell Lecture in Sociological Jurisprudence was delivered by Professor Julie Stone Peters.
Law has always been a domain of performance, forged in dramatic encounters between suspects and police, defendants and judges, prisoners and guards, sovereigns and subjects. In our era, such encounters have become ever-visible, multiplying kaleidoscopically as they stream across our screens. In this lecture, she looks closely at several paradigmatic scenes of legal performance—in courtrooms, prisons, and the streets—suggesting how they enact law dialogically while implicitly theorizing and interpreting it. She argues that sociological jurisprudence cannot do without performance jurisprudence: jurisprudence that treats broad social forces as the product of specific expressive encounters in local space and time; that views law as viscerally experiential; that zooms in to examine how it actually unfolds in the moment; that recognizes the jurisprudential operations of performance itself, —its interpretive and lawmaking power. Theorizing the legal “scene,” its relationship to the streaming media it produces, and its formation of the spectator as legal subject, pondering the dilemmas of law-by-media, she considers how the performance encounter may both intervene in doctrine and exceed doctrinal capture, acting in ways too heterogeneous and contradictory to be easily classified, resonating subliminally toward an unknown future.
Professor Julie Stone PetersProfessor Peters (BA Yale, PhD Princeton, JD Columbia) specializes in a number of fields that traverse traditional period divisions: law and humanities; drama, theatre, and performance; and film and comparative media. Her most recent book is Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 2022).