Law’s Sovereignty

Description

Part of the CRASSH Fellows Work in Progress Seminar Series.  All welcome but please email Michelle Maciejewska to book your place and to request readings.  A sandwich lunch and refreshments are provided.

Professor Richard Sherwin

Law’s sovereignty points to a source of authority beyond the law itself. My current research focuses on the nature of this strange excess, and on the limits of representation. As one moves from early modern emblems of the King’s two bodies to post-Revolutionary symbols of the People’s two bodies, to digital simulations of world and subjectivity in the ‘Internet of Experience’, the question arises: where do we locate law’s surplus? In what narrative, visual, cognitive, and affective registers does it find expressive coherence in history?

Learning from patterns and distinctions in history constitutes an important dimension of this research. I will focus on Shakespeare and his contemporaries as a starting point for a case study of how legal thinking and process are conditioned by, and in turn inflect, social and imaginative constructions of cognition. Scenes of trials and judgment abound in this period’s drama. How do the evidentiary registers of the theatre correlate with the construction of proof in the courtroom? And what role does rhetoric play in mediating between the two? Such a cross-domain inquiry tests law’s claim to knowledge against the traditions of the humanities. How do law’s distinct disciplinary investments demand and constrain belief? What lies beyond law’s formal bounds challenging its representational capacities? Similar issues arise as law adapts to contemporary visual culture. For example, how do lawyers tap into the uncanny fullness of corporeal images, and to what extent does law reflect a digital visual spectacle that threatens to flatten out the visual meaning-making process? Here the dialectic of surplus and bounded meaning enters into dialogue with the ethics of representation. In a digital culture where closed, automated programs produce a broad range of evidentiary constructions inside the courtroom – from crime risk assessments at bail and sentencing hearings to simulated crime scenes at trial – the authority of representation calls out for adequate critical testing. By combining cross-disciplinary and cross-historical perspectives, I hope to forge a methodology that does justice to the complexity of our textual and visual experience of law’s aesthetics, epistemology, and the source of its authority.