In this book, a group of lawyers and legal historians help to identify the new Nordic legal map, which is under construction. This book is a collection of papers addressing legal staging, and most of the articles combine theoretical approaches to the visuality of law with practical experiences and effects. The texts show that law is so much more than law in action and law in books: law is also part of a visual culture. It contributes to that culture and is, in turn, analyzed, maintained, and criticized by that culture. At the same time, the cultural manifestations of law change the way we understand law and, thus, change law itself.

Considering plays by Philip Massinger, Richard Brome, Ben Jonson, John Ford and James Shirley, this study addresses the political import of Caroline drama as it engages with contemporary struggles over authority between royal prerogative, common law and local custom in seventeenth-century England. How are these different aspects of law and government constructed and negotiated in plays of the period? What did these stagings mean in the increasingly unstable political context of Caroline England? Beginning each chapter with a summary of the legal and political debates relevant to the forms of authority contested in the plays of that chapter, Jessica Dyson responds to these kinds of questions, arguing that drama provides a medium whereby the political and legal debates of the period may be presented to, and debated by, a wider audience than the more technical contemporary discourses of law could permit. In so doing, this book transforms our understanding of the Caroline commercial theatre’s relationship with legal authority.

In Staging the Trials of Modernism, Dale Barleben explores the interactions among literature, cultural studies, and the law through detailed analyses of select British modern writers including Oscar Wilde, Joseph Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, and James Joyce. By tracing the relationships between the literature, authors, media, and judicial procedure of the time, Barleben illuminates the somewhat macabre element of modern British trial process, which still enacts and re-enacts itself throughout contemporary judicial systems of the British Commonwealth. Using little seen legal documents, like Ford's contempt trial decision, Staging the Trials of Modernism uncovers the conversations between the interior style of British Modern authors and the ways in which law began rethinking concepts like intent and the subconscious. Barleben’s fresh insights offer a nuanced look into the ways in which law influences literary production.

From the Colonial to the Contemporary explores the representation of law, images and justice in the first three colonial high courts of India at Calcutta, Bombay and Madras. It is based upon ethnographic research work and data collected from interviews with judges, lawyers, court staff, press reporters and other persons associated with the courts. Observing the courts through the in vivo, in trial and practice, the book asks questions at different registers, including the impact of the architecture of the courts, the contestation around the renaming of the high courts, the debate over the use of English versus regional languages, forms of addressing the court, the dress worn by different court actors, rules on photography, video recording, live telecasting of court proceedings, use of CCTV cameras and the alternatives to courtroom sketching, and the ceremony and ritual that exists in daily court proceedings. The three colonial high courts studied in this book share a recurring historical tension between the Indian and British notions of justice. This tension is apparent in the semiotics of the legal spaces of these courts and is transmitted through oral history as narrated by those interviewed. The contemporary understandings of these court personnel are therefore seen to have deep historical roots. In this context, the architecture and judicial iconography of the high courts helps to constitute, preserve and reinforce the ambivalent relationship that the court shares with its own contested image.

The essays in Staging the Renaissance show the theatre to be the site of a rich confluence of cultural forces, the place where social meanings are both formed and transformed. The volume unites some of the most challenging issues in contemporary Renaissance studies and some of our best-known critics, including Stephen Orgel, Margaret Ferguson, Cath

Staging Violence Against Women and Girls brings together three contemporary plays that denounce gendered violence, along with interviews with their creators and the practitioners who have staged them in different national contexts. Little Stitches (London, 2014): consisting of four short pieces by Isley Lynn, Raúl Quirós Molina, Bahar Brunton and Karis E. Halsall, this play presents Female Genital Mutilation/Cutting (FGM/C) from the points of view of by-standers, anti-FGM/C activists, health professionals, women who perpetuate the practice and, finally, survivors. 'Kubra' (Sydney, 2016): written by Dacia Maraini, this short play features a young woman who was subjected to FGM/C as a child and now, years later, brings her case to court in a search for justice. A Trial for Rape (Rome, 2018): adapted for theatre by Renato Chiocca from the international award-winning 1979 documentary of the same name, this play reveals how judicial procedures and attitudes toward sexual violence tend to turn rape survivors from accusers into accused. In their interviews, the writers, directors and producers discuss their conception and production of the works collected in Staging Violence Against Women and Girls. The plays and their creators highlight the urgency of raising awareness of these forms of violence and giving voice to survivors.

Critical theory, characteristically linked with the politics of theoretical engagement, covers the manifold of the connections between theory and praxis. This thought-provoking Research Handbook captures the broad range of those connections as far as legal thought is concerned and retains an emphasis both on the politics of theory, and on the notion of theoretical engagement. The first part examines the question of definition and tracks the origins and development of critical legal theory along its European and North American trajectories. The second part looks at the thematic connections between the development of legal theory and other currents of critical thought such as; Feminism, Marxism, Critical Race Theory, varieties of post-modernism, as well as the various ‘turns’ (ethical, aesthetic, political) of critical legal theory. The third and final part explores particular fields of law, addressing the question how the field has been shaped by critical legal theory, or what critical approaches reveal about the field, with the clear focus on opportunities for social transformation.