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Show and Tell: Law as Performance and Narrative (LAW-RT-LAWPER-24)

LAW-RT-LAWPER-24

Description

Law consists of ritualized performances of authority—involving wigs, gavels, and stuffy writing—and of stories that convey what is just and legal, natural and real. (Sure, law is a body of rules, too.)
Competent lawyers rely on tacit knowledge to perform and narrate law convincingly. Where legal training normally renders familiar and invisible how lawyers “show and tell,” in this seminar, we seek to estrange the normal to put law’s performativity and narrativity center stage. In line with the motto “show, don’t tell”, the seminar prioritizes analyzing specific narratives and performances over reading literature that deals with these concepts in the abstract.

Learning objectives
The seminar’s objectives are threefold:

• to guide researchers in discerning how their research objects can be understood as performances and stories;
• to equip researchers with concepts and tools to analyze legal phenomena as performances and stories; and
• to enable researchers to reflect on the narrative and performance dimensions of legal scholarship, including their own.

Structure
The seminar will consist primarily of group discussions based on prior readings. Discussion questions will be distributed before each session in a shared document and invite participants to add to this document any further questions they may want to address in class.
The seminar will be made up of five two-hour sessions.

Reading list:
https://readinglist.eui.eu/leganto/public/39EUI_INST/lists/2253070340008406?auth=SAML&idpCode=SAML_LEGANTO


First, Second & Third Term: registration from 26 to 30 September 2024

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