Since its first publication in 1961 E.H. Carr's What is History? has established itself as the classic introduction to the subject. Ranging across topics such as historical objectivity, society and the individual, the nature of causation, and the possibility of progress, Carr delivered an incisive text that still has power to provoke debate today. For this fortieth anniversary reissue, Richard J. Evans has written an extensive new introduction that discusses the origins and the impact of the book, and assesses its (...) relevance in the age of the 21st century postmodernism and epistemological anxiety. (shrink)

The proposed volumes are aimed at a multidisciplinary audience and seek to fill the gap between law, semiotics and visuality providing a comprehensive theoretical and analytical overview of legal visual semiotics. They seek to promote an interdisciplinary debate from law, semiotics and visuality bringing together the cumulative research traditions of these related areas as a prelude to identifying fertile avenues for research going forward. Advance Praise for Law, Culture and Visual Studies This diverse and exhilarating collection of essays explores the (...) many facets both historical and contemporary of visual culture in the law. It opens a window onto the substantive, jurisdictional, disciplinary and methodological diversity of current research. It is a cornucopia of materials that will enliven legal studies for those new to the field as well as for established scholars. It is a 'must read' that will leave you wondering about the validity of the long held obsession that reduces the law and legal studies to little more than a preoccupation with the word. Leslie J Moran Professor of Law, Birkbeck College, University of London Law, Culture and Visual Studies is a treasure trove of insights on the entwined roles of legality and visuality. From multiple interdisciplinary perspectives by scholars from around the world, these pieces reflect the fullness and complexities of our visual encounters with law and culture. From pictures to places to postage stamps, from forensics to film to folklore, this anthology is an exciting journey through the fertile field of law and visual culture as well as a testament that the field has come of age. Naomi Mezey, Professor of Law, Georgetown University Law Center, Washington, D.C., USA This highly interdisciplinary reference work brings together diverse fields including cultural studies, communication theory, rhetoric, law and film studies, legal and social history, visual and legal theory, in order to document the various historical, cultural, representational and theoretical links that bind together law and the visual. This book offers a breath-taking range of resources from both well-established and newer scholars who together cover the field of law's representation in, interrogation of, and dialogue with forms of visual rhetoric, practice, and discourse. Taken together this scholarship presents state of the art research into an important and developing dimension of contemporary legal and cultural inquiry. Above all, Law Culture and Visual Studies lays the groundwork for rethinking the nature of law in our densely visual culture: How are legal meanings produced, encoded, distributed, and decoded? What critical and hermeneutic skills, new or old, familiar or unfamiliar, will be needed? Topical, diverse, and enlivening, Law Culture and Visual Studies is a vital research tool and an urgent invitation to further critical thinking in the areas so well laid out in this collection. Desmond Manderson, Future Fellow, ANU College of Law / Research School of Humanities and the Arts, Australian National University, Australia. (shrink)

“ S pace, K no w l edge and P o w e r ” , en tr ev i s t a r ea l i z a d a en 1982 y pub li cada en P aul R ab i no w , The Foucau l t R eade r , N ueva Y o r k, 1984. A quí se pub li ca de acue r do a l a ve r s i ón f r (...) ancesa, t r aduc i da por P ab l o Bli t s t e i n y Tadeo L im a. (shrink)

This study investigates the interrelation of outer appearance and spatial configuration of modern Chinese court buildings with the party-state’s strategy of building regime legitimacy. The spatial element of this relation is explored in four different court buildings in Kunming, Chongqing, Shanghai and Xi’an. It is argued that court buildings contribute to the empowerment of individuals who appear as parties in trials. Courthouses also facilitate the courts’ function of exercising social control and the application of an instrumentalist approach to the principle (...) of public trials. Both the grounding of court buildings in the past and their compliance with international models of a modern independent judiciary are aspects of consolidating regime legitimacy. (shrink)

The identification of courts as “open” and “public” institutions is commonplace in national and transnational conventions. But even as those attributes are taken for granted, the privatization of adjudication is underway. This Article explores how—during the last few centuries—public procedures came to be one of the attributes defining certain decision-making institutions as “courts.” The political and theoretical predicates for such practices can be found in the work of Jeremy Bentham, a major proponent of what he termed “publicity,” a practice he (...) commended by detailing the architecture for various entities—from the Panopticon for prisoners to the Parliament for legislators and courts for judges. Bentham argued the utility of publicity in enhancing accuracy, public education, and judicial discipline. Moving forward in time, I examine various contemporary techniques in several jurisdictions that shift the processes of adjudication toward privatization. Included are the devolving adjudication to less-public government entities such as administrative agencies; outsourcing to private providers; and reconfiguring the processes of courts to render them more oriented toward settlement. For those appreciative of the role courts play in developing and protecting human rights, these new practices are problematic because adjudication can itself be a site offering opportunities to engage in democratic practices. The odd etiquette entailed in public adjudication under democratic legal regimes imposes obligations on government and disputants to treat each other—before an observant and often times critical public—as equals. Public and private power can be constrained by such performative requirements. When decision making takes place in public, the application of law to fact can engender normative contestation predicated on popular input. This claim of public adjudication’s democratic potential and utilities is, however, not an argument that the judgments provided and the norms developed will necessarily advance a shared view of the public welfare. Hence, while eager to re-engage Bentham, I offer different claims for publicity and less optimism about its consequences. (shrink)

The right to a fair trial as a fundamental human right has been widely established in the international community. While the notion of a fair trial is typically associated with procedural safeguards, fairness can be reflected in spatial dimensions. Courtroom design, apart from achieving its main functional objectives, reflects the institutional ideology of how justice can be staged in public. In alignment with the perspective that courtroom as theatre consists of a sign system, this paper adopts a semiotic approach to (...) the courtroom setting of Chinese criminal trials. With a thick description of space, mobility and attire, it attempts to probe into how judicial ideology is symbolically framed in the field. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork of three courts, this paper discusses how courtroom space is constructed semiotically as a performative stage on which legal dramas unfold. Ultimately this paper argues that a semiotic investigation of Chinese courtrooms will shed light on an understanding of its judicial value, ideology of justice and dynamics of power relationship. (shrink)