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Peter Goodrich and Anna Kimmel : Introduction -- Lorna Hutson : Law, Rhetoric and Fictionality in the Age of Theatre : A Literary Response to Law as Performance -- Subha Mukherji : The poetics of hypokrisis in the early modern judicial theatre -- Piyel Haldar : The Outdoor Stages of Common Law -- Derek Miller : Law Text Performance -- Jesus Velasco : On Dialogue : Or Legal Performance in the Affective Space -- Simon Stern : Performing for the Audience -- Jisha Menon : Desiring Children : Vulnerability and the Sex Offender -- Goodrich : The Comediography of Law -- Baak Ertür : The Force of Laughter and a Minor Jurisprudence of Refusal : A Question of Silence (Marleen Gorris, 1982) -- Marco Wan : Oath Taking and Legal Performance -- Anna Jayne Kimmel : Naked Athena and Classical Lines : Wayward Aesthetics of the Exposed Body -- Julie Stone Peters : Coda / Cauda / Cado : What I Learned from Performing Law ; or, Thereby Hangs a Tail.

The words 'all rise' announce the appearance of the judge in the thespian space of the courtroom and trigger the beginning of that play we call a trial. The symbolically staged enactment of conflict in the form of litigation is exemplary of legal action, its liturgical and real effects. It establishes the roles and discourses, hierarchy and deference, atmospheres and affects that are to be taken up in the more general social stage of public life. Leading international scholars drawn from performance studies, theatre history, aesthetics, dance, film, history, and law provide critical analyses of the sites, dramas and stage directions to be found in the orchestration of the tragedies and comedies acted out in multiple forums of contemporary legality. This title is also available as open access on Cambridge Core.

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