Richard Mohr

Reassembling the legal: 'The wonders of modern science' in court-related proceedings

The article analyses the ways in which technology and law disperse, channel and reassemble agency in ICT-enabled legal proceedings. It works from case studies of online civil claims in England and Italy, and the automatically issued speed camera fine process in Australia. Information and communication technologies affect legal procedures in three dimensions: legitimacy, efficacy and performativity. The law can legitimate ensembles of technological and performative procedures, but it cannot construct them by regulation. Technology is a distinct regulative regime that opens some channels of communication while closing others. Machines and software codes identify and admit participants and direct human activity. The focus on the performative explores the requirements of sense-making, by which participants recognise the context and the legal consequences of ICT-enabled procedures. The interfaces of law and technology rely on the interpretive context in which messages are understood as well as the legal forms in which they are transmitted. Each of these elements is essential to the circulation of agency between people and things that reassembles and constitutes legal and social relationships.

Law and identity in spatial contests

Law has had a traditional reference to land, conceived as territory, in the notion of a jurisdiction, where the law of the land applies equally to all individuals. Recent critiques of this view have suggested that a plurality of laws may apply in particular places. How this spatial pluralism impacts on dominant views of law is considered through two instances in which law has interacted with competing conceptions of place and territory in relations between European and Indigenous Australians. Space, law and identity are seen to constitute each other in complex forms. Indigenous beliefs and practices challenge the claims to universality of Western conceptions of law and space deriving from Roman law and spatial practices.

Law and religion in public life : the contemporary debate

1. Introduction: Da Capo: law and religion from the top down, Richard Mohr and Nadirsyah Hosen Part 1: Law state and secularism 2. Classifying church-state arrangements - beyond religious versus secula, Darryn Jensen 3. Christian origins of secularism and the rule of law, Richard Mohr 4. The future of secularism: a critique, Margaret Davies Part 2: Religion and speech in a pluralist society 5. Religion, multiculturalism and legal pluralism, Frank Brennan SJ 6. Religion and freedom of speech in Australia, Katharine Gelber 7. The reasonable audience of religious hatred - the semiotic ideology of anti-vilification laws in Australia, Massimo Leon Part 3 Religion as a factor in legal processes and decisions 8. Religion and security: whats your motive?, Nadirsyah Hosen 9. Religion and justice: atonement as an element of justice in both western law and Christian thought, Cassandra Sharp 10. Why should I do this? Private property, climate change and Christian sacrifice, Paul Babie Part 4: Negotiating religious law and personal beliefs 11. Jewish law in a modern Australian context, Rabbi Jeremy Lawrence 12. Does Australia need a mufti? Analyzing the institution of ifta in an Australian contemporary context, Mohamad Abdalla Afterword: A posteriori: the experience of religion, Nadirsyah Hosen and Richard Mohr

Flesh and the Person

An analysis of the relationship between flesh and the legal person is presented. It explores the documents and representations of the physical being that construct the legal personhood. These include documents and marks that apparently represent legal identity, such as passports and identity cards, and the information they hold. Other legal traces such as the signature and historical records of events in constructing legal narratives are also examined. The possibility of perceiving a life out of the various legal and administrative traces is discussed.

How the Law Can Make It Simple: Easing the Circulation of Agency in e-Justice

The chapter analyses the ways in which technology and law disperse, channel and reassemble agency in ICT enabled legal proceedings. It works from five of the case studies of e-justice discussed in the book, assessing how different approaches magnify or reduce complexity and affect systems development and use. The law can legitimate ensembles of technological and performative procedures, but it cannot construct them by regulation through a legal blueprint. Attempts at excessive legal regulation quickly raise complexity to unmanageable levels. Technology is assessed as a distinct regulative regime that opens new channels of communication, potentially duplicating existing legal and traditional channels. The regulation of technology could take advantage of this state of affairs. Machines and software codes identify and admit participants and direct human activity. Some of the difficulties in reproducing legal processes in technologically enabled environments are explained by the demands of the performative, where meanings exceed the demands of simple information flow. The chapter explores the requirements of meaning making, by which participants recognise the context and the legal consequences of ICT enabled procedures. The interfaces of law and technology rely on the interpretive context in which messages are understood as well as the legal forms in which they are transmitted. Each of these elements is essential to assure the circulation of agency in ICT enabled legal proceedings, while ensuring the legality of the entire ensemble.

Signature and illusion: Lessons from the baroque for 'truth' in law, arts and humanities

Abstract Basic to contemporary problems in the disciplines of representation and interpretation is a split between a naïve acceptance of bare facts, presumed to exist in their own ‘objective’ world of objects, and the actions of subjects who interpret an intersubjective world. The solution is sought in some ‘new’ epistemologies: Martïn Alcoff, Grosz, Kristeva, Butler, as well as in Benjamin and Gadamer, who look back to older ways of knowing. The methodology is an archaeology of these ways of knowing, focussed on a crucial transition in the understanding of representation between the renaissance and the baroque. It uses quintessential methods of the humanities: narrative, keywords and critique. The narrative tracks two keywords of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, signature and illusion (inganno), through their uses in renaissance science and baroque arts and philosophy. Following the enlightenment split between the understanding of the arts or humanities and sciences, the keywords re-emerge in familiar contemporary legal forms: the signature as an efficacious performative; illusion as ideology and repression. The truth in law, as in the arts and humanities, is built up from interrogation of representations, prior understanding, and comprehension of human motivation. For this it needs a hermeneutics based in tradition and memory. Since representations and interpretations can be vehicles for rationalisation and repression, there is also need for a critical hermeneutics, which may find truth in unexpected places, such as the repressed memory uncovered in an old ritual or image.

Internormative Gastronomies: Law, Nation and Identity

Norms applying to food interact with conceptions of nationhood, identity and law. This occurs through gastronomies and ethico-religious standards, recognition and conviviality, and the voice of communities in the sourcing and labelling of their food. Law, nation and identity intersect in the notion of citizenship. The chapter moves from the tight relationships by which persons are constrained within overdetermined categories of state law and national citizenship, to explore the possibilities unleashed by a loosening of the bonds between law, nation and identity. Sections deal in turn with each of these “loosenings”, as we prize apart the knots that bind (i) identity and nation, (ii) nation and law, and (iii) law and identity, each in relation to the cultural and legal context of food. With these loosenings, the unified jurisdiction of the nation-state gives way to plural and informal law; a single national identity expands into multiple ethical and ethnic associations; identity is no longer determined by state-centred legal interpellation but allows persons to “inhabit” a range of norms. By expanding the scope for participation and interaction in each of these areas, citizenship finds new networks for expansion, enrichment and reflexivity. The full spectrum of social justice can only be addressed by regimes and networks that ensure fair and adequate distribution of food, that respect the cultural demands as well as the biological needs of communities, and that ensure participation, through choices informed by personally relevant criteria and social and political structures.