When: Monday, March 13, 2023, 6:15 PM - 7:30 PMWhere: ArtsTwo Lecture Theatre, Queen Mary University of London, London E1 4NS Mile End Road London E1 4NS
The School of Law is delighted to host Professor Julie Stone Peters (Columbia) as our 2023 Cotterrell Lecturer. Now in their 8th year, the Annual Cotterrell Lectures in Sociological Jurisprudence are named in honour of our colleague Professor Roger Cotterrell.
‘Sociological jurisprudence’ is understood broadly in the series, as encompassing any theoretical aspect of socio-legal studies, any serious effort to relate jurisprudence and legal theory to changing social and historical conditions, or any topic linking law and social theory.
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, I will look 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. I will argue 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, I will consider 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 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).
For more about past lectures in the series, including video recordings, visit the Cotterrell Lecture page.