Law as Performance

To make authority requires being seen as having the capacity to call the disobedient to account. As Julie Stone Peters brilliantly excavates in her analysis of the performance of law in literary and legal accounts, the audience regularly took center stage. This volume is a treasure trove of ideas and images illuminating the interwoven fabric of courts and theater, as both genres are dependent on spectatorship for their vitality. * Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, Yale Law School, co-authors of Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (2011) * In this extraordinarily detailed study, Julie Stone Peters lays out the rich tradition of lawyerly performance and establishes in an entirely persuasive manner the uneasy, tension-filled and yet symbiotic relationship between law's desire to inhabit a cool rational center and the inevitable eruption of eloquence and emotion in the services of causes both noble and savage. A fine achievement. * Stanley Fish, Benjamin N., Cardozo School of Law, author of Versions of Academic Freedom: From Professionalism to Revolution, How Milton Works, and Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies * The jury is in: with compelling scholarship that matches evidence and argument across 2,000 years of legal rhetorical practice, Julie Stone Peters proves that the continuities of law as performance are as startling as the changes, and she dramatizes how theatricality and anti-theatricality plead their cases before the bar of Janus-faced Lady Justice with adversarial vehemence and at times shocking irreverence. * Joseph Roach, Yale University, author of It (2007), Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (1996), and The Player's Passion: Studies in the Science of Acting (1993) * In this fascinating and elegantly written monograph, Julie Stone Peters explores the theatricality of trials and punishments in ancient, medieval, and Early Modern Europe. She profoundly interrogates the somewhat Whiggish notion that one can draw a clear line between justice and the performance of the law, let alone that there is an increasing dissonance between the two as England entered modernity. This is wonderful history, not only because of the deftness of its arguments but also because of the rich anecdotal detail that enlivens nearly every page. Legal studies have been well served by this marvelous book. * William Chester Jordan, Princeton University, author of From England to France: Felony and Exile in the High Middle Ages (Princeton University Press, 2015) * Peters pursues the puzzle of law's vividae rationes, its speaking to the eye, with her characteristic erudition, analytic acuity and verbal verve. The long history of legal theatrics, of air filled with gestures, of the clamor of the pit, of costume, contumely and conflict here find their appositely dramatic inscription. Exhaustive and meticulous, the history of the myriad forms in which jurists have staged legal judgement takes on an urgent topicality as social media and its omnivoyant lenses fulminate the forensic forum into the viral voracity and extravagant exposure of an increasingly populist online public sphere. In sum and pestle, Law as Performance brilliantly transforms the cold gray Janus face of the jurist into the terpsichorean and tempestive figure of justice being done. * Peter Goodrich, Professor of Law, Director of the Program in Law and Humanities, Cardozo Law School *