Belliveau on Law-and-Literature Workpiece: A Montage of the Law

S. Belliveau has published Law-as-Literature Workpiece: a Montage of the Law. Here is the abstract.

This paper depicts law through prosaic and photographic montage. In matters of law, every interpretation necessarily concerns a claim in right to administer violence through enforcement. Montage as form in writing about law gives a greater scope for interpretation to the reader, more so than traditional narrative. This work incorporates elements of literary and photographic montage as developed by John Heartfield and Walter Benjamin, and as described by Siegfried Kracauer and Walter Benjamin. The Frankfurt School's perspective on critical theory informs montage in this paper.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Tomlins on A Poetics for Spatial Justice: Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjmin

Christopher Tomlins, University of California, Berkeley, Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program, is publishing A Poetics for Spatial Justice: Materialism and Legal Historiography, from Bachelard to Benjamin in the Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

As the linguistic/cultural turn of the last forty years has begun to ebb, socio-legal and legal-humanist scholarship has seen an accelerating return to materiality. This paper asks what relationship may be forthcoming between the “new materialisms” and “vibrant matter” of recent years, and older materialisms – both historical and literary, both Marxist and non-Marxist – that held sway prior to post-structuralism? What impact might such a relationship have on the forms, notably “spatial justice,” that materiality is assuming in current legal studies? To attempt answers, the paper turns to two figures from more than half a century ago: Gaston Bachelard – once famous, now mostly forgotten; and Walter Benjamin – once largely forgotten, now famous. A prolific and much-admired writer between 1930 and 1960, Bachelard pursued two trajectories of inquiry: a dialectical and materialist and historical (but non-Marxist) philosophy of science; and a poetics of the material imagination based on inquiry into the literary reception and representation of the prime elements – earth, water, fire, and air. Between the late 1920s and 1940, meanwhile, Benjamin developed an idiosyncratic but potent form of historical materialism dedicated to “arousing [the world] from its dream of itself.” The paper argues that by mobilizing Bachelard and Benjamin for scholarship at the intersection of law and the humanities, old and new materialisms can be brought into a satisfying conjunction that simultaneously offers a poetics for spatial justice and lays a foundation for a materialist legal historiography for the twenty-first century.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

A New Book on Law's "Spatial Turn": Spaces of Justice, Edited by Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir

Chris Butler and Edward Mussawir, both of the Griffith Law School, are editing Spaces of Justice: Peripheries, Passages, Appropriations (Routledge, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

This collection is inspired by the transdisciplinary possibilities posed by the connections between space and justice. Drawing on a variety of theoretical influences that include Henri Lefebvre, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Doreen Massey, Gillian Rose, Walter Benjamin, Elias Canetti, Antonio Negri and Yan Thomas, the contributors to this book conduct a series of jurisprudential, aesthetic and political inquiries into ‘just’ modes of occupying space, and the ways in which space comes under the signs of law and justice. Bringing together leading critical legal scholars with theorists and practitioners from other disciplines within the humanities, Spaces of Justice investigates unexplored associations between law and architectural theory, the visual arts, geography and cultural studies. The book contributes to the ongoing destabilisation of the boundaries between law and the broader humanities and will be of considerable interest to scholars and students with an interest in the normative dimensions of law’s ‘spatial turn’.