1st Edition
The Routledge Handbook of Cultural Legal Studies
This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the cutting-edge field of cultural legal studies.
Cultural legal studies is at the forefront of the legal discipline, questioning not only doctrine or social context, but how the concerns of legality are distributed and encountered through a range of material forms. Growing out of the interdisciplinary turn in critical legal studies and jurisprudence that took place in the latter quarter of the 20th century, cultural legal studies exists at the intersection of a range of traditional disciplinary areas: legal studies, cultural studies, literary studies, jurisprudence, media studies, critical theory, history, and philosophy. It is an area of study that is characterised by an expanded or open-ended conception of what ‘counts’ as a legal source, and that is concerned with questions of authority, legitimacy, and interpretation across a wide range of cultural artefacts. Including a mixture of established and new authors in the area, this handbook brings together a complex set of perspectives that are representative of the current field, but which also address its methods, assumptions, limitations, and possible futures.
Establishing the significance of the cultural for understanding law, as well as its importance as a potential site for justice, community, and sociality in the world today, this handbook is a key reference point both for those working in the cultural legal context – in legal theory, law and literature, law and film/television, law and aesthetics, cultural studies, and the humanities generally – as well as others interested in the interactions between authority, culture, and meaning.
1. Cultural Legal Studies: Methodologies of Reflexive Attunement
Thomas Giddens, Karen Crawley and Timothy D Peters
Part I: Methods or Orientations
2. Imagination
Mark Antaki and Kirsten Anker
3. It’s Law: Towards a Form of the Cultural Legal
Dale Mitchell
4. Law and the Unconscious
Daniel Hourigan
5. “It is Not a Question of Drawing the Contours, but what Escapes the Contour”: Aesthetics, Provisionality, Finitude
Karin van Marle
6. Testify! Reflections on Cultural Legal Studies and Indigenous Legal Orders
Rebecca Johnson
7. The Aesthetics of Sovereignty
Daniel Matthews
8. Jurisography: A Report on Cultural Legal Study, Australia
Ann Genovese and Shaun McVeigh
Part II: Readings
9. Law and Horror
Penny Crofts
10. Prohibition, Contract and Nomoi for the Future in Star Trek: Picard
Kieran Tranter
11. The Use of Superheroes for Cultural Legal Studies: Batman’s Two Bodies and the Political Theology of the Corporate Image
Timothy D Peters
12. Cultural Legalities of Social Media
Cassandra Sharp
13. Scribbling on the Moon: The Melancholia of Lunar Nullius
Thomas Giddens
14. Law, Poetry and the Voice of Nature
Mariëlle Matthee
15. The Parallel Lives of Legal Persons and Video Game Avatars
Ashley Pearson
16. Alien Nation: Redefining the Alien in Law and Science Fiction
Susan Bird and Jo Bird
Part III: Performance and Performative Legalities
17. “The Working of Time”: Transitional Justice and Body Memory in Rithy Panh’s Cinema
Maria Elander
18. Staging the Judicial Figure: The Parallels between Legal and Operatic Interpreters
Ryan Kernaghan
19. Pluralising Judicial Authority: The Double-Voiced Opinion
Julen Etxabe
20. A Legal Frame-work of Urban Modernity: The Court of Criminal Appeals, Chicago (1927) Style
Leslie H Abramson
21. The Evidence of Juridical Documentaries
Mónica López Lerma
22. Sovereign Signatures: Australian First Nations Petitions
Trish Luker
23. Doing Theatrical Jurisprudence
Marett Leiboff
Part IV: Cinematic Legalities
24. Cinelegal Techniques
Suzanne Bouclin
25. Picturing the Judiciary, Telling the Story of the Judge: The Discursivity and Narrativity of Judicial and Legal Culture in 21st Century Chinese Film
Agnes S Schick-Chen
26. The Myth of the Big, Bad Narco: Cinematic Jurisprudence and U.S-Mexican Drug Wars
Luis Gómez Romero
27. Film and the Re-imagination of Kinship: Graham Kolbeins’s Queer Japan (2019)
Marco Wan
28. Tanya’s Last Resort: On Law, Justice and Enclosure
Emma Patchett
29. Can I Have your Hands? The Use of Bodies in the Horror Genre and Refugee Law
Justine Poon
30. Terror Nullius (2018): Queering the Australian Colonial Imaginary
Karen Crawley and Kim Weinert
Biography
Karen Crawley is Senior Lecturer at Griffith Law School, Brisbane, Australia.
Thomas Giddens is Chair of Jurisprudence at Dundee Law School, Dundee, UK.
Timothy D Peters is Associate Professor of Law at the University of the Sunshine Coast, Queensland, Australia.
