Law as Performance

JULIE STONE PETERS (B.A. Yale, Ph.D. Princeton, J.D. Columbia) is the H. Gordon Garbedian Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, an Affiliated faculty member at Columbia Law School, and a Global Professorial Fellow at Queen Mary University School of Law. A scholar of law and humanities and media history, she studies performance, film, digital, and legal cultures across the longue durée. Her books include Staging Witchcraft Before the Law: Skepticism, Performance as Proof, and Law as Magic in Early Modern Witch Trials (Cambridge UP, 2024) and Theatre of the Book: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe 1480-1880 (OUP, 2000, winner of the MLA's Harry Levin Prize and English Association's Beatrice White Prize, and finalist for the Barnard Hewitt Award). Her more public-facing essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review, London Review of Books, Slate, the Village Voice, Public Books, and elsewhere.

• Introduction 1: Theatre, Theatrocracy, and the Politics of Pathos in the Athenian Lawcourt 2: The Roman Advocate as Actor: Actio, Pronuntiatio, Prosopopoeia, and Persuasive Empathy in Cicero and Quintilian 3: Courtroom Oratory, Forensic Delivery, and the Wayward Body in Medieval Rhetorical Theory 4: Irreverent Performances, Heterodox Subjects, and the Unscripted Crowd from the Medieval Courtroom to the Stocks and Scaffold 5: Performing Law in the Age of Theatre (c. 1500-1650) 6: Legal Performance Education in Early Modern England Epilogue

Julie Stone Peters has written a book remarkable for both its multimillennial, polyglot breadth and its numerous outrageous particulars.... [A]n impossibly erudite, analytically acute, and very funny tour of European law, as it was practiced: messily, showily, and humanly.... A wonderful book, which mobilizes vast linguistic skill, legal acumen, and general erudition to produce ... a rich, entertaining archive, which it analyzes sensitively and with a fine eye for detail, and in lucid, beautiful prose. Law and Performance is itself a bravura performance, to which future scholars will return as both a treasure trove and a model for imitation.