Inutilious propaedeutics: Performances in theatre and law.

Abstract

The profession of law, according to another early commentator, ‘wastes the greatest part of the verdour and vigour of youth’, and elsewhere the advice for neophytes is of ‘temperance . . . restraint’ and avoidance of all excess. Physical passivity, a reverence embodied in downcast eyes and dull decorum, seems to have been the prevalent desi- deratum by which to mirror a law that once writ moves on, ‘nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a single word’. It is this textualist, fundamentally literary perception of a sedentary profession, lost in books, dormant in libraries, locked up in linguistic obscurity that comes under sustained critical scrutiny in the new materialism and for current purposes in Marett Leiboff’s (2020) recent opus Towards a Theatrical Jurisprudence. It is a work that seeks to recover the sensible life of the law, the art of the legal actor as thespian, the play and the performance of the trampler being wrested from its sillographic sense and returned to an active theatrical mode of emancipated encounter and embodied presence. (from Introduction)