Reviewed by:

• Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval and Early Modern Europe by Julie Stone Peters
• Subha Mukherji (bio)

Julie Stone Peters's expansive, exciting, and richly researched book, Law as Performance, opens arrestingly with an account of an aborted trial by combat at Tothill Fields, Westminster, in 1571. The truth was that the parties had settled their legal dispute the day before. But the Queen decreed that the ritual of the trial must go on nonetheless, and entertain the gathered audience—but only for the plaintiffs to fail to show up, and for the event to fail to deliver on the expectations aroused. "This was clearly theatre," Peters writes, "but it was also law" (3). This vivid recounting of a spectacular event simulating a judicial arbitration places law in the wider context of play and playing in London—the whole range from fencing to theatre—and takes us to the heart of her thesis: law as a performance practice, its history, and its varied manifestations. It shifts the common notion of law as doctrine and rules to make available an understanding of law as performative courtroom action. Thus, it effectively displaces logos with ethos and pathos at the centre of the legal scene. But it also demonstrates that legal performance is a "constitutive idea in western jurisprudence" (9), unearthing an array of sources, ancient to early modern, from which law derives sanction, authority, and guidelines.

At the same time, Peters brings alive the ambivalence around the theatrical in law—the simultaneous proximity and rivalry that Peter Goodrich so brilliantly excavated (and traced back to Plato) in his short piece on "Law" back in 2001, in the Oxford Encyclopaedia of Rhetoric edited by Thomas O. Sloane. As Kathy Eden pointed out in 1986, "the Renaissance hypocrite originates in the Greek theatre, the Renaissance actor in the Roman law court" (Legal and Poetic Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition, 5). The observation that law is both theatrical and antitheatrical is not, in fact, unfamiliar to the now mature field of law and literature (though it may yet come as a surprise to legal practitioners unaware of the long, intertwined traditions traced here). What Peters brings to the idea is a grippingly granular analysis of both Aristotle's own oscillations between a rejection of the emotional manipulation of the jury and his visceral intuition of its importance (46–47), and how this paradox plays out in the courtroom. Her account of the sixteenth-century French lawyer Etienne Pasquier's re-casting of the tears of Simon Bobie in chapter 4 (244–50) is a masterful example of her unpacking of the duality of hypocrisis, which focuses law's inextricability from rhetoric and its performative imperatives. Bobie is Pasquier's client Arconville's opponent: Pasquier presents his visible affect as a manipulative mask, and Arconville's dry eyes as a sign of masculine, Stoic veracity, while at the same time emplotting [End Page 299] Arconville's wife's tears as a sign of distress and a trigger of judicial pathos. It as if the layered performativity and self-reflexive impersonations written into legal practice—not to speak of its embeddedness in legal training, the mise-en-abime of which is brilliantly reconstructed in chapter 6 (esp. 273–80)—unmoored the very touchstones of sincerity. Even as Pasquier's command of the peripateia of his case is shown to be aimed at vivifying the "contrast between visible truth and concealed falsehood" (249), this purported theatre of exposure is also shown to stage his own consummate hypocrisis. One of the achievements of this book is to keep this irreducible ambiguity in view without losing sight of the ethical commitment of law. Peters probes the arguably self-evident moral agenda of law-courts through the ages to reveal dilemmas that go to the heart of the ethics of emotion at stake in legal representation. This comes through most interestingly in her exploration of advocacy in chapter 2, which puts the spotlight...

审阅者：

• 《法律作为表演：古代、中世纪和近代早期欧洲的戏剧性、观众性和法律制定》作者：朱莉·斯通·彼得斯
• 苏巴·慕克吉（个人简介）

朱莉·斯通·彼得斯 (Julie Stone Peters) 的著作《法律作为表演》内容丰富、激动人心、研究丰富，以 1571 年在威斯敏斯特托特希尔球场 (Tothill Fields) 举行的一场流产的战斗审判作为开篇。事实是，双方在前一天就解决了法律纠纷。 。但女王下令，审判仪式必须继续进行，并娱乐聚集的观众——但前提是原告不能到场，审判也不能达到人们的期望。“这显然是戏剧，”彼得斯写道，“但它也是法律”（3）。生动地叙述了一场模拟司法仲裁的壮观事件，将法律置于伦敦更广泛的游戏和表演背景中——从击剑到戏剧的整个范围——并将我们带到了她论文的核心：法律作为一种表演实践，它的历史，及其各种表现形式。它改变了法律作为学说和规则的常见概念，使人们能够将法律理解为法庭行为。因此，它有效地用法律场景中心的精神和悲情取代了徽标。但它也表明，法律履行是“西方法学的基本理念”（9），挖掘出从古代到近代早期的一系列来源，法律从中获得制裁、权威和指导方针。

与此同时，彼得斯生动地展现了法律戏剧中的矛盾心理——彼得·古德里奇在 2001 年牛津百科全书中关于“法律”的短文中出色地挖掘了（并追溯到柏拉图）同时存在的接近性和竞争性托马斯·O·斯隆 (Thomas O. Sloane) 编辑的《修辞学》 。正如凯西·伊登1986年指出的那样，“文艺复兴时期的伪君子起源于希腊戏剧，文艺复兴时期的演员起源于罗马法庭”（《亚里士多德传统中的法律与诗意小说》 ，5）。事实上，对于现在成熟的法律和文学领域来说，法律既是戏剧性的又是反戏剧性的这一观察并不陌生（尽管对于不知道这里追溯的长期、交织的传统的法律从业者来说，这可能会感到惊讶）。彼得斯对这个想法的贡献是对亚里士多德本人在拒绝陪审团情绪操纵和他对其重要性的本能直觉之间的摇摆（46-47）以及这一悖论如何在法庭上发挥作用进行了令人着迷的细致分析。她在第四章（244-50）中对十六世纪法国律师艾蒂安·帕斯奎尔（Etienne Pasquier）重铸西蒙·博比（Simon Bobie）的眼泪的描述是她揭示虚伪二元性的一个精彩例子，重点关注法律与修辞及其表演的不可分割性。势在必行。博比是帕斯奎尔的客户阿康维尔的对手：帕斯奎尔将他明显的情感呈现为一个操纵性的面具，而阿康维尔的干眼作为阳刚、斯多葛式诚实的标志，同时策划[结束第299页]阿康维尔妻子的眼泪作为痛苦和痛苦的标志。司法悲情的触发因素。就好像将分层的表演性和自我反省的模仿写入法律实践中——更不用说它嵌入到法律培训中了，其中的mise -en-abime在第6章（特别是273-80）中得到了精彩的重构——解除了法律培训的束缚。非常真诚的试金石。即使帕斯奎尔对他的案件的指挥被证明是为了生动地表现“可见的真相与隐藏的谎言之间的对比”（249），这种所谓的曝光戏剧也被证明是为了上演他自己完美的虚伪。本书的成就之一就是在不忽视法律的道德承诺的情况下，牢记这种不可简化的模糊性。彼得斯探讨了多年来法庭可以说是不言而喻的道德议程，以揭示法律代表中涉及情感伦理核心的困境。最有趣的是她在第二章中对倡导的探索，这将焦点放在了……