Theatre of the Rule of Law

Theatre of the Rule of Law PDF Author: Stephen Humphreys
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113949533X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 333

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Book Description
Theatre of the Rule of Law presents a sustained critique of global rule of law promotion - an expansive industry at the heart of international development, post-conflict reconstruction and security policy today. While successful in articulating and disseminating an effective global public policy, rule of law promotion has largely failed in its stated objectives of raising countries out of poverty and taming violent conflict. Furthermore, in its execution, this work deviates sharply from 'the rule of law' as commonly conceived. To explain this, Stephen Humphreys draws on the history of the rule of law as a concept, examples of legal export during colonial times, and a spectrum of contemporary interventions by development agencies and international organisations. Rule of law promotion is shown to be a kind of theatre, the staging of a morality tale about the good life, intended for edification and emulation, but blind to its own internal contradictions.

Theatre of the Rule of Law

Theatre of the Rule of Law PDF Author: Stephen Humphreys
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 113949533X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 333

Get Book Here

Book Description
Theatre of the Rule of Law presents a sustained critique of global rule of law promotion - an expansive industry at the heart of international development, post-conflict reconstruction and security policy today. While successful in articulating and disseminating an effective global public policy, rule of law promotion has largely failed in its stated objectives of raising countries out of poverty and taming violent conflict. Furthermore, in its execution, this work deviates sharply from 'the rule of law' as commonly conceived. To explain this, Stephen Humphreys draws on the history of the rule of law as a concept, examples of legal export during colonial times, and a spectrum of contemporary interventions by development agencies and international organisations. Rule of law promotion is shown to be a kind of theatre, the staging of a morality tale about the good life, intended for edification and emulation, but blind to its own internal contradictions.

Wrol (Without Rule of Law)

Wrol (Without Rule of Law) PDF Author: Michaela Jeffery
Publisher: Playwrights Canada Press
ISBN: 9780369102386
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 96

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Book Description
Convinced the world at large can't be trusted to prioritize the well-being of adolescent girls in the event of a cataclysmic event (or just in general), a determined troupe of preteen "doomers" commit to preparing for survival in the post-collapse society they anticipate inheriting. When Maureen, Jo, Sarah, Vic, and Robbie sneak out at night to investigate an ominous hidden lair in the woods, they believe they have stumbled onto proof of what happened to a mysterious local cult that vanished over a decade ago. As they search for vital clues, examining small bones and dusty cans of food for signs of life, they fight to understand how to be understood in a world that seems to reject them. What they discover changes everything--eighth grade will never be the same. Part Judy Blume, part Rambo, this darkly comic coming-of-age story for complicated times is for any young woman who has ever been told that she is "too much," or that what she fears is illegitimate, or that what she has to say is less important than keeping the peace.

Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution

Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution PDF Author: Paul Raffield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1847316069
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Through an examination of six plays by Shakespeare, the author presents an innovative analysis of political developments in the last decade of Elizabethan rule and their representation in poetic drama of the period. The playhouses of London in the 1590s provided a distinctive forum for discourse and dissemination of nascent political ideas. Shakespeare exploited the unique capacity of theatre to humanise contemporary debate concerning the powers of the crown and the extent to which these were limited by law. The autonomous subject of law is represented in the plays considered here as a sentient political being whose natural rights and liberties found an analogue in the narratives of common law, as recorded in juristic texts and law reports of the early modern era. Each chapter reflects a particular aspect of constitutional development in the late-Elizabethan state. These include abuse of the royal prerogative by the crown and its agents; the emergence of a politicised middle class citizenry, empowered by the ascendancy of contract law; the limitations imposed by the courts on the lawful extent of divinely ordained kingship; the natural and rational authority of unwritten lex terrae; the poetic imagination of the judiciary and its role in shaping the constitution; and the fusion of temporal and spiritual jurisdiction in the person of the monarch. The book advances original insights into the complex and agonistic relationship between theatre, politics, and law. The plays discussed offer persuasive images both of the crown's absolutist tendencies and of alternative polities predicated upon classical and humanist principles of justice, equity, and community. 'It is now canon in progressive U.S. legal scholarship that to focus solely on the text of our Constitution is myopic. We look as well for "constitutional moments", moments when the zeitgeist is so transformed that our fundamental legal charter changes with it. In this breathtakingly erudite book, Paul Raffield argues that the late-Elizabethan period was such a "constitutional moment" in England, a moment literally "played out" for the polity by the greatest dramatist of all time. A lawyer and a thespian, Raffield handles both legal and literary sources with exquisite care. As with the works of the Old Masters, one dwells pleasurably on each detail until their cumulative force presses one backward to see the canvas in its sudden, glorious entirety. A major achievement.' Kenji Yoshino Chief Justice Earl Warren Professor of Constitutional Law, NYU School of Law

The Rule of Law

The Rule of Law PDF Author: Tom Bingham
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141962011
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
'A gem of a book ... Inspiring and timely. Everyone should read it' Independent 'The Rule of Law' is a phrase much used but little examined. The idea of the rule of law as the foundation of modern states and civilisations has recently become even more talismanic than that of democracy, but what does it actually consist of? In this brilliant short book, Britain's former senior law lord, and one of the world's most acute legal minds, examines what the idea actually means. He makes clear that the rule of law is not an arid legal doctrine but is the foundation of a fair and just society, is a guarantee of responsible government, is an important contribution to economic growth and offers the best means yet devised for securing peace and co-operation. He briefly examines the historical origins of the rule, and then advances eight conditions which capture its essence as understood in western democracies today. He also discusses the strains imposed on the rule of law by the threat and experience of international terrorism. The book will be influential in many different fields and should become a key text for anyone interested in politics, society and the state of our world.

Stitching

Stitching PDF Author: Anthony Neilson
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1472536487
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 70

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Book Description
We will fix it. We will mend it... In the light of a pregnancy, a faithless couple pick apart their relationship, stitch by painful stitch. Can it be mended? Anthony Neilson's dark and intimate new play is a love story set at the extremes of brutality, banality and tenderness. Stitching opened at the Traverse Theatre, Edinburgh, on 2 August 2002 and transferred to the Bush Theatre, London, on 12 September 2002."Explodes with power, discipline, integrity and sheer cruel psychological accuracy ... Neilson's writing has a terrible beauty" Sunday Times "Startlingly rich and challenging, Neilson depicts with aching precision a relationship in which love is undermined by distrust" Time Out "Shattering, shocking...a serious, persuasive account of the blind alleys love can lead us down" Daily Telegraph "A characteristically brave and brutal offering" Independent "A deeply mesmerising, if shocking, experience as a couple smashes through taboo after taboo in a harrowing sexual tug of war" Evening Standard

Theaters of Pardoning

Theaters of Pardoning PDF Author: Bernadette Meyler
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 1501739395
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
From Gerald Ford's preemptive pardon of Richard Nixon and Donald Trump's claims that as president he could pardon himself to the posthumous royal pardon of Alan Turing, the power of the pardon has a powerful hold on the political and cultural imagination. In Theaters of Pardoning, Bernadette Meyler traces the roots of contemporary understandings of pardoning to tragicomic "theaters of pardoning" in the drama and politics of seventeenth-century England. Shifts in how pardoning was represented on the stage and discussed in political tracts and in Parliament reflected the transition from a more monarchical and judgment-focused form of the concept to an increasingly parliamentary and legislative vision of sovereignty. Meyler shows that on the English stage, individual pardons of revenge subtly transformed into more sweeping pardons of revolution, from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, where a series of final pardons interrupts what might otherwise have been a cycle of revenge, to later works like John Ford's The Laws of Candy and Philip Massinger's The Bondman, in which the exercise of mercy prevents the overturn of the state itself. In the political arena, the pardon as a right of kingship evolved into a legal concept, culminating in the idea of a general amnesty, the "Act of Oblivion," for actions taken during the English Civil War. Reconceiving pardoning as law-giving effectively displaced sovereignty from king to legislature, a shift that continues to attract suspicion about the exercise of pardoning. Only by breaking the connection between pardoning and sovereignty that was cemented in seventeenth-century England, Meyler concludes, can we reinvigorate the pardon as a democratic practice.

The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law

The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law PDF Author: Jens Meierhenrich
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108620175
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 715

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Book Description
The Cambridge Companion to the Rule of Law introduces students, scholars, and practitioners to the theory and history of the rule of law, one of the most frequently invoked-and least understood-ideas of legal and political thought and policy practice. It offers a comprehensive re-assessment by leading scholars of one of the world's most cherished traditions. This high-profile collection provides the first global and interdisciplinary account of the histories, moralities, pathologies and trajectories of the rule of law. Unique in conception, and critical in its approach, it evaluates, breaks down, and subverts conventional wisdom about the rule of law for the twenty-first century.

Legislative Theatre

Legislative Theatre PDF Author: Augusto Boal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 113467371X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

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Book Description
Augusto Boal's reputation is now moving beyond the realms of theatre and drama therapy, bringing him to the attention of a wider public. Legislative Theatre is the latest and most remarkable stage in his work. 'Legislative Theatre' is an attempt to use Boal's method of 'Forum Theatre' within a political system to create a truer form of democracy. It is an extraordinary experiment in the potential of theatre to affect social change. At the heart of his method of Forum Theatre is the dual meaning of the verb 'to act': to perform and to take action. Forum Theatre invites members of the audience to take the stage and decide the outcome, becoming an integral part of the performance. As a politician in his native Rio de Janeiro, Boal used Forum Theatre to motivate the local populace in generating relevant legislation. In Legislative Theatre Boal creates new, theatrical, and truly revolutionary ways of involving everyone in the democratic process. This book includes: * a full explanation of the genesis and principles of Legislative Theatre * a description of the process in operation in Rio * Boal's essays, speeches and lectures on popular theatre, Paolo Freire, cultural activism, the point of playwrighting, and much else besides.

Opposing the Rule of Law

Opposing the Rule of Law PDF Author: Nick Cheesman
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107083184
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
A striking new analysis of Myanmar's court system, revealing how the rule of law is 'lexically present but semantically absent'.

Law and the Political Economy of Hunger

Law and the Political Economy of Hunger PDF Author: Anna Chadwick
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0192557211
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
This book is an inquiry into the role of law in the contemporary political economy of hunger. In the work of many international institutions, governments, and NGOs, law is represented as a solution to the persistence of hunger. This presentation is evident in the efforts to realize a human right to adequate food, as well as in the positioning of law, in the form of regulation, as a tool to protect society from 'unruly' markets. In this monograph, Anna Chadwick draws on theoretical work from a range of disciplines to challenge accounts that portray law's role in the context of hunger as exclusively remedial. The book takes as its starting point claims that financial traders 'caused' the 2007-8 global food crisis by speculating in financial instruments linked to the prices of staple grains. The introduction of new regulations to curb the 'excesses' of the financial sector in order to protect the food insecure reinforces the dominant perception that law can solve the problem. Chadwick investigates a number of different legal regimes spanning public international law, international economic law, transnational governance, private law, and human rights law to gather evidence for a counterclaim: law is part of the problem. The character of the contemporary global food system-a food system that is being progressively 'financialized'-owes everything to law. If world hunger is to be eradicated, Chadwick argues, then greater attention needs to be paid to how different legal regimes operate to consistently privilege the interests of the wealthy few over the needs of poor and the hungry.