Edward Mussawir

The cinematics of jurisprudence: Scenes of "Law's moving image"

Abstract Finding the themes for an image-based jurisprudence within Law’s Moving Image, a collection of interdisciplinary academic pieces on law and cinema, this review article attempts, using a Deleuzian art, to map the assemblages of law and cinema to a zone of shared conceptuality . Law’s Moving Image addresses three elements of cinematics—framing, shot, and montage—and posits them as indistinguishable from the respective elements of a juristic image—censorship, sovereignty, and logic. We can understand why scholars are ceasing to ask just what the effect of law is on cinema, or vice versa, and beginning to focus on the indistinction that defines each as a conceptual practice.

The Activity of Judgment: Deleuze, Jurisdiction and the Procedural Genre of Jurisprudence

Modern legal theory is beginning to rediscover its connection with the language and conceptuality of ‘‘jurisdiction.’’ The reasons for this are not simply theoretical: — they are also technical and pragmatic. In an age in which the capacity to make new laws has been invoked as an almost mechanical response to changing patterns of social order, the connection that jurisprudence may still keep with the technical work of jurisdiction represents an important and unresolved problem. This article enlists Gilles Deleuze’s critique of the activity of judgment to explore this problem and to reconstruct some elements to a procedural genre of jurisprudence.

Jurisdiction of Control: Judgment and Procedural Forms in Thomas v Mowbray

Reading judgment and case law is a typical exercise within common law scholarship. Yet, although the interpretation of judgment forms a central mode of legal science in the common law tradition, a theoretical account of the authority that attaches to the aesthetic of judgment within this tradition remains more marginal. This article argues that the authority of judgment can be assessed less productively through an attention to its outcomes, reasons and rationalisations than through the technological problems of jurisdiction and with what one can call its ‘procedural forms’. While the jurisdiction of federal courts to issue ‘interim control orders’ against persons for the purpose of preventing a terrorist act in Australia was affirmed in the High Court case of Thomas v Mowbray, one question remaining from this case is how the procedure of ‘control’ itself might shape the legal authority of adjudication.

To isolate the law: the activity of the jurist in Digest 9.2.27.12 and Digest 45.3.18.2

ABSTRACT What use does the jurist have for rules and principles? What relation does he or she have to the articulation of facts? This paper considers the position of facts and rules in the casuistry of the Roman jurists. Two textual analyses of the Digest of Justinian are presented: a reading of Digest 9.2.27.12 (a statement by Ulpian on the application of the lex Aquilia to the situation of the burning of some bees) and Digest 45.3.18.2 (a consideration by Papinian of a difficult case concerning the fate of a contract made by a slave while his owner was in captivity). The paper argues that these fragments reveal the craft of the jurist in unexpected ways. What at first appears as the awkwardness of expression in them turns out to disclose a remarkable lucidity. Framed through a reading of the work of Yan Thomas, these fragments provide two nodal points for unveiling the nature of an art that does not ask what law is but seeks to isolate it in its cases.

Spaces of Justice : Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations

This book has its origins in a symposium we convened in December 2013 which aimed to explore the transdisciplinary possibilities of thinking about the spatial dimensions of justice. Oering a unique set of perspectives on the contours and interstices of law’s ‘spatial turn’, the essays collected here oer a series of ontological, historical, aesthetic, jurisprudential and political inquiries into just modes of inhabitance and the deeper conceptual connections between space, justice and juridical relations.

The law of persons today: at the margins of jurisprudence

ABSTRACT Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the Ganges and Yamuna in India, effectively treating them as having all the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. Looking at such cases, in which the enduring fiction of the legal person is extended over an increasingly wide range of referents, we are reminded that this fiction is anything but marginal – especially in the law of any jurisdiction influenced, however indirectly, by Roman jurisprudence. This paper begins from the point of view that the anthropological embedding of the juridical person ought not to be anachronistically attributed to the Roman ‘law of persons’ in which its craft originated. Rather, we suggest, the well-known Christian metaphysicalization of the juridical person as a moral entity not only adds to but also transforms and displaces that law as a juristic enterprise. What is marginalized in this sense is in fact Roman laws discrete and self-conscious techniques of shaping the legal person. This chapter aims not just to highlight the familiar fate of the person under the influence of church doctrine, but also to draw a contemporary inspiration – and, more cautiously, a critical potential – from a return to a casuistic, concrete and immanent conception of the jurisprudential art of crafting the person. Rather than argue for the inclusion of excluded identities within laws categories (thus extending such categories but doing nothing to challenge the often heteronormative construction of the identities it encompasses), this chapter asks what would it mean to return to an ‘experimental’ law of persons (or a ‘profaned’ art of fashioning the person, in Giorgio Agambens sense)? Might this eventually be a path by which to liberate juristic technique to new uses?

By the Hands of Rhea: Notes on the Juridical Meaning of the Bear

Abstract This article follows some tracks of an animal (the bear) in the work of jurisprudence. Starting with the common law of civil liability for keepers of bears, this article explores the significance of the bear in nineteenth-century case law and legal philology, showing that the animal itself does not leave the historical contours of legal doctrine unmodified. Reflecting in particular on the work of nineteenth-century Swiss jurist and philologist, Johann Jakob Bachofen, the article examines the imprint that the bear leaves in legal literature and the implications to be drawn from the historical attempts to search for an elusive maternal symbolic in jurisprudence. To speak of an animal in its relation to ‘right’ requires attention first of all to be paid to the distinct shape and the distinct gender this animal has acquired in the thought and discipline of law.

The Trial: Elements of a Legal Assemblage of Desire

If it has become possible in recent times to talk of a jurisprudence of Franz Kafka,1 it should be realised firstly that two things dear or indispensable to the writer will have long been disfigured in the study of law: desire and its assemblage. “For spiritual nourishment,” he writes of his legal education I have nothing but sawdust, which, to crown it all, has been chewed over already by thousands of mouths before me (Kafka, 1966, p. 94, as cited in Legendre, 1997, p. 101).Jurisprudence, after all, would be a very specialised field in which one must speak a very specialised and sober language; a particular form of expression inseparable from a particular investment of desire. But Kafka’s problem with legal studies, if it can be viewed as a problem of sawdust, would not be for example what else one can chew, but simply this: how else to put one’s mouth to use? In other words, how to invent a mode of expression as the only real way to desire, or alternatively how to desire as the only real way to express oneself. For this, one always finds a machine – literature, letters, childhood or animal machines perhaps, as Kafka discovers for himself. And of course the various juridical machines through which desire is assembled and organised according to strict formalisations of content and enunciation. Jurisprudence would still not have come close to laying its hands (or its mouth) upon this assemblage in which it, as a small or even marginal component, discovers its functionality: a legal assemblage of desire.