Karen Crawley – författare

This book engages with the place of law and legality within Australia’s distinctive contribution to global televisual culture.Australian popular culture has created a lasting legacy – for good or bad – of representations of law, lawyers and justice ‘down under’. Within films and television of striking landscapes, peopled with heroes, antiheroes, survivors and jokers, there is a fixation on law, conflicts between legal orders, brutal violence and survival. Deeply compromised by the ongoing violence against the lives and laws of First Nation Australians, Australian film and television has sharply illuminated what it means to live with a ‘rule of law’ that rules with a legacy, and a reality, of deep injustice. This book is the first to bring together scholars to reflect on, and critically engage with, the representations and global implications of law, lawyers and justice captured through the lenses of Australian film, television and social media.Exploring how distinctively Australian lenses capture uniquely Australian images and narratives, the book nevertheless engages these in order to provide broader insights into the contemporary translations and transmogrifications of law and justice.

Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation is a path-breaking collection of some of the world’s leading cultural legal scholars addressing issues of law, representation and the image. Law is constituted in and through the representations that hold us in their thrall, and this book focuses on the ways in which cultural legal representations not only reflect or contribute to an understanding of law, but constitute the very fabric of legality itself. As such, each of these ‘readings’ of cultural texts takes seriously the cultural as a mode of envisioning, constituting and critiquing the law. And the theoretically sophisticated approaches utilised here encompass more than simply an engagement with ‘harmless entertainment’. Rather they enact and undertake specific political and critical engagements with timely issues, such as: the redressing of past wrongs; recognising and combatting structural injustices; and orienting our political communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a cultural legal studies that provides the means for engaging in robust, sustained and in-depth encounters with the nature and role of law in a global, mediated world.

This handbook provides a comprehensive introduction to the cutting-edge field of cultural legal studies.Cultural legal studies is at the forefront of the legal discipline, questioning not only doctrine or social context, but how the concerns of legality are distributed and encountered through a range of material forms. Growing out of the interdisciplinary turn in critical legal studies and jurisprudence that took place in the latter quarter of the 20th century, cultural legal studies exists at the intersection of a range of traditional disciplinary areas: legal studies, cultural studies, literary studies, jurisprudence, media studies, critical theory, history, and philosophy. It is an area of study that is characterised by an expanded or open-ended conception of what ‘counts’ as a legal source, and that is concerned with questions of authority, legitimacy, and interpretation across a wide range of cultural artefacts. Including a mixture of established and new authors in the area, this handbook brings together a complex set of perspectives that are representative of the current field, but which also address its methods, assumptions, limitations, and possible futures.Establishing the significance of the cultural for understanding law, as well as its importance as a potential site for justice, community, and sociality in the world today, this handbook is a key reference point both for those working in the cultural legal context – in legal theory, law and literature, law and film/television, law and aesthetics, cultural studies, and the humanities generally – as well as others interested in the interactions between authority, culture, and meaning.

In this collection, the essays examine the critical role that judgments about noise and sound played in framing the meaning of civility in British discourse and literature during the long eighteenth century. The volume restores the sonic dimension to conversations about civil conduct by exploring how censured behaviours and recommended practices resonated beyond the written word. As the contributors show, understanding changing perceptions and valuations of noise and sound allows us to chart how civility was understood in the context of significant political, social and cultural change, including the development of urban life, the extension of empire and the consolidation of legal procedure. Divided into three parts, Sound, Space and Civility in the British World demonstrates how both noise and sound could be recognized by eighteenth-century Britons as expressions of civility. The essays also explore the audible implications of uncivil conduct to complicate our understanding of the sonic range of politeness. The uses of sound and noise to interrogate British colonial anxieties about the distinction between civility and incivility are also investigated. Taken together, the essays identify the emergence of civility as a development that radically altered sonic attitudes and experiences, producing new notions of what counted as desirable or undesirable sound.

This book engages with the place of law and legality within Australia’s distinctive contribution to global televisual culture.Australian popular culture has created a lasting legacy – for good or bad – of representations of law, lawyers and justice ‘down under’. Within films and television of striking landscapes, peopled with heroes, antiheroes, survivors and jokers, there is a fixation on law, conflicts between legal orders, brutal violence and survival. Deeply compromised by the ongoing violence against the lives and laws of First Nation Australians, Australian film and television has sharply illuminated what it means to live with a ‘rule of law’ that rules with a legacy, and a reality, of deep injustice. This book is the first to bring together scholars to reflect on, and critically engage with, the representations and global implications of law, lawyers and justice captured through the lenses of Australian film, television and social media.Exploring how distinctively Australian lenses capture uniquely Australian images and narratives, the book nevertheless engages these in order to provide broader insights into the contemporary translations and transmogrifications of law and justice.

Envisioning Legality: Law, Culture and Representation is a path-breaking collection of some of the world’s leading cultural legal scholars addressing issues of law, representation and the image. Law is constituted in and through the representations that hold us in their thrall, and this book focuses on the ways in which cultural legal representations not only reflect or contribute to an understanding of law, but constitute the very fabric of legality itself. As such, each of these ‘readings’ of cultural texts takes seriously the cultural as a mode of envisioning, constituting and critiquing the law. And the theoretically sophisticated approaches utilised here encompass more than simply an engagement with ‘harmless entertainment’. Rather they enact and undertake specific political and critical engagements with timely issues, such as: the redressing of past wrongs; recognising and combatting structural injustices; and orienting our political communities in relation to uncertain futures. Envisioning Legality thereby presents a cultural legal studies that provides the means for engaging in robust, sustained and in-depth encounters with the nature and role of law in a global, mediated world.