It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence. This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law's archive.

Complicity is emerging as a key cultural and critical term for understanding settler responsibility in postcolonial contexts – especially in thinking through the sense of responsibility arrived at through transitional justice processes. But what sense can we make of complicity within more pedestrian legal processes? Here, I examine an emergent narrative of complicity in “everyday law” through the framework of evaluating harms provided by the Royal Commission into Institutional Reponses to Child Sexual Abuse (“the Commission”). I analyze one case study in particular – the 19th public hearing of the Commission was held between October 22 and 31, 2014, and on November 14, 2014 (“the Bethcar Case Study”) – to provide a reading of complicity in the context of everyday legal proceedings that took place within the wider context of Australia's postcolonial reckoning of harms suffered by the Stolen Generations. This article focuses on the role and conduct of lawyers, and of law, in the civil proceedings relating to institutional responsibility for abuse, a process at a seeming distance from the scene of original trauma. I argue that the Commission makes available a narrative of the lawyers’ role in the ongoing violence against survivors – one story and case study that, as it concerns abuse in the context of the removal of Aboriginal children, is part of wider structural violence against Aboriginal people. The Commission provides a rich source for analyzing these legal processes and provides an archive of lawyers’ responsibility that is not normally made available through law. It examines the complicity of the legal profession in harms produced by the legal system itself.

What are the terms of evaluation that seem relevant in deciding whether a film is feminist or anti-feminist? Which critical practices should be engaged in such an evaluation? In recent and contemporary critical feminist practices, feminist arguments are no longer based on a stable subject category of “woman” and there is no longer any particular methodology upon which feminist theorists rely. The category of “woman” has been revealed to be not an ahistorical, stable category but an effect of material and representational practices. Further, feminist methodologies have been concerned to contextualize the framing of the questions they ask, as well as their place in the methodologies they employ. In addition to the refusal of an essentialized female subject, feminists have called into question the idea that it is possible to produce a “feminist method” based on the standpoint of a female subjectivity, even where this subjectivity is admitted as a construct, arguing that this extrapolation to the general from a particular point of view produces political, and frequently racist, effects. In this essay, I consider Lars von Trier’s controversial film Dogville (2003) as a case study to explore the relation of practices of representation to questions of feminist justice. I argue that the film does a lot of good critical work in showing the ways in which certain practices of representation can be mobilized to produce a collectivity (or “sovereignty”) that is seen to emanate from “the people” and to thereby instantiate authority, while simultaneously disguising the material and political effects of its subjugation of “others.” However, in doing this work the film produces its own problematic construction of universality and particularity. Further, the film instrumentalises representations of sexual violence and subjection in order to prove its point, and as productive as these tactics are to illuminating questions of social justice, I argue that this representational practi...

© The Author(s) 2012 School bullying has been recognized only relatively recently by policy-makers, media and the courts as a serious and widespread social problem. But despite this recent notice, there has been no evidence that techniques adopted to stop bullying have led to anything more than modest success, implying that we need to do more work to unpack and theorize the nature of bullying. In this article, we consider a recent vampire narrative as a story about bullying. We offer an interpretation of this story via the theories of Claudia Card and Jacques Derrida, arguing that together this archive provides a more nuanced understanding of the kinds of damage inflicted by bullying than has been provided by realist or sociological accounts. In particular, it illuminates damage to the morality of the victim, to their soul, which is a kind of damage that has previously not been given great attention. It also highlights the ways in which practices of judgment can become very tangled when trying to resolve bullying situations, making these experiences resistant to the achievement of justice.

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In this paper, I am using the provocation of `the source to examine the significance of a recent iteration of Stolen Generations testimonies to questions of contemporary social justice. This testimonial form has had a complicated and fraught history across Australian legal and cultural domains: in the handful of cases that have dealt with injuries arising out of the Stolen Generations, courts have placed oral testimony in contest with state documentary records1 ; oral testimony has also featured in different iterations of extra-legal Stolen Generations projects, which have been produced by state, corporate and Indigenous parties, sometimes leading to the problem of testimonies being co-opted into state and private projects, which do not necessarily benefit Indigenous people

The case of South Australia v Lampard-Trevorrow opens up key questions about the capacity and willingness of the common law to adjudicate past acts of the state. This article considers the significance of the appeal decision by examining what distinguishes the case from past, unsuccessful claims and considers its implications for future claimants from the Stolen Generations. In addition, we consider what the case means in terms of the law's acceptance of a practice of historical and evidential interpretation that is different from previous cases, and how this is particularly important regarding the issue of parental consent. We argue that the role and interpretation of consent have broad ramifications for law's potential to adjudicate responsibility for historical harms. We also argue that the findings in relation to false imprisonment and fiduciary duty limit the potential of the Trevorrow cases. In particular, we examine, and lament, the Full Court's more limited reading of false imprisonment in contrast to the trial judgment.

Trauma studies has had a long relationship with legal studies. Shoshana Felman argues that 'trauma - individual as well as social - is the basic underlying reality of the law' (2002: 172). The law has made available certain forms for the representation and adjudication of traumatic experience. Among others, testimony and the trial are legal forms that offer the potential for justice for traumatic events, at the same time that they delimit the ways in which trauma can be understood (Felman 2002; Sarat et al 2007). The means by which trauma is represented determines which experiences are privileged and recognized - which also means that some harms will become invisible under certain frameworks. Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law's version of justice.

School bullying has been recognized only relatively recently by policy-makers, media and the courts as a serious and widespread social problem. But despite this recent notice, there has been no evidence that techniques adopted to stop bullying have led to anything more than modest success, implying that we need to do more work to unpack and theorize the nature of bullying. In this article, we consider a recent vampire narrative as a story about bullying. We offer an interpretation of this story via the theories of Claudia Card and Jacques Derrida, arguing that together this archive provides a more nuanced understanding of the kinds of damage inflicted by bullying than has been provided by realist or sociological accounts. In particular, it illuminates damage to the morality of the victim, to their soul, which is a kind of damage that has previously not been given great attention. It also highlights the ways in which practices of judgment can become very tangled when trying to resolve bullying situations, making these experiences resistant to the achievement of justice.

2012 marks the 80th anniversary of Donoghue v Stevenson, a case that is frequently cited as the starting-point for a genealogy of negligence. This genealogy starts with the figure of the neighbour, from which, as Jane Stapleton eloquently describes, a "golden thread" of vulnerability runs into the present (Stapleton 2004, 135). This essay examines the harms made visible and invisible through the neighbour figure, and compares the law's framework to Virginia Woolf's subtle re-imagining and theorisation of responsibility in her novel Mrs. Dalloway (1925). I argue that Woolf critiques and supplements the law's representations of suffering. Woolf was interested in interpreting harms using a framework of neighbourly responsibility, but was also critical of the kinds of proximities recognised by society. Woolf made new harms visible within a framework of proximity: in this way, we might think of Woolf's work as theorizing a feminist aesthetic of justice, and as providing an alternate genealogy of responsibility to Donoghue v Stevenson.

Aesthetic considerations are bound up with thematic questions of justice, and an interdisciplinary engagement between law and culture offers methodologies through which to interrogate and reframe legal understandings of harm. While there is no particular form that can, a priori, be designated feminist, we can talk meaningfully about practices of representation, and methodologies, as being feminist or otherwise. This essay seeks to re-animate questions concerning the relationship between feminisms and representation, asking what it might mean to talk about a legal, feminist aesthetic: what are the terms of evaluation that seem relevant in judging representation as feminist or otherwise? What are the stakes of such an enquiry? These methodological questions will be considered with respect to a specific archive - first, a legal archive comprising recent feminist engagements with international criminal and human rights law dealing with sexual violence in conflict zones; and second, a cultural text, Sarah Kane's play Blasted (1995). This essay engages with and extends feminist commentary regarding the legal interventions, explicating the benefits of a law and culture approach to ongoing questions in feminist theories and practice. It provides an example of the ways in which a cultural text can illuminate problematic practices of representation that have developed in the law and critical commentary, and which seem natural or even unmoveable. The practice of re-seeing made available through engagement with this cultural text is, it is argued, a practice of justice.

In Donoghue v Stevenson,1 the House of Lords established negligence as an independent tort and reformulated the responsibility owed by one person to another in civil society. The accident of Mabel Hannah finding a snail in her ginger beer became the occasion for the law to disrupt the (then) normal practices of manufacture specifically, and socioeconomic conditions more generally, by introducing attentiveness to vulnerability as a civil ethic. This essay looks back at the case and reads it in its cultural and material contextswith the intention of illuminating Lord Atkins neighbour principle within its specific historical framework, and to look again at the justice Mabel Hannah received through the decision. This reading will examine the gap between law and social justice, and re-contextualise the potential of tort law to operate as a kind of civil ethics or system of moral value. In this reading I consider the inflections of the neighbour figure, reading the cases Biblical `Golden Rule alongside the anti-ethics of Nietzsche and Freud. I also consider the ongoing paradox of the neighbour as a figure for the recognition of suffering.

© 2020 selection and editorial matter, Anne Wagner and Le Cheng; individual chapters, the contributors. This chapter examines the relationship of the related figures of social contract and dysfunctional town, and how they explicate law’s role in historical violence. It also argues that Dogville essentially concerned with the relationship between representation and contract – both the social contract and the individual contractual arrangements that are key to contemporary legal and social life. Dogville tells the story of Grace Margaret Mulligan, a young woman on the run, who flees a corrupt, mafia-run city and comes upon an isolated town. At first glance, the town seems wholesome and kindly. The year is 1933: the mines have closed and there is no money. There is nothing innovative about a community dehumanizing an outsider. But Dogville is innovative in the way it stages the framing of this dehumanization: rather than a naturalistic slide into violence, the film frames Grace’s treatment by the town as an effect of moral and legal technique.

Proceeding chronologically, the volume offers leading analyses of the juncture between legal and visual culture as witnessed from the fifteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

In Australia, law’s imaginary is part of our colonial legacy. Law’s narratives and figures, as well as what we might more widely think of as its practices of representation, produce social, economic and political realities. The imaginary is therefore an important domain of intervention for social justice, which must be interrogated and challenged. Such interrogation can be thought of as a ‘literary jurisprudence’, which involves taking up exemplary practices of representation that model ways alternative ways of thinking about relations between Aboriginal and Western laws. This means thinking beyond the abstractions of legal analytic categories to include affect, experience and culture, providing a method that can resist and re-situate Western law’s continuing claims to authority over Aboriginal people. In this chapter, by way of an example of these practices, I provide a reading of harm and authority in the latest novel by Alexis Wright, a leading Australian novelist. I argue that what is needed, and what this reading provides, is a literary jurisprudence that challenges law’s imaginary.

The demand for recognition, responsibility, and reparations is regularly invoked in the wake of colonialism, genocide, and mass violence: there can be no victims without recognition, no perpetrators without responsibility, and no justice without reparations. Or so it seems from law’s limited repertoire for assembling the archive after ‘the disaster’. Archival and memorial practices are central to contexts where transitional justice, addressing historical wrongs, or reparations are at stake. The archive serves as a repository or ‘storehouse’ of what needs to be gathered and recognised so that it can be left behind in order to inaugurate the future. The archive manifests law’s authority and its troubled conscience. It is an indispensable part of the liberal legal response to biopolitical violence.

This collection challenges established approaches to transitional justice by opening up new dialogues about the problem of assembling law’s archive. The volume presents research drawn from multiple jurisdictions that address the following questions. What resists being archived? What spaces and practices of memory - conscious and unconscious - undo legal and sovereign alibis and confessions? And what narrative forms expose the limits of responsibility, recognition, and reparations? By treating the law as an ‘archive’, this book traces the failure of universalised categories such as 'perpetrator', 'victim', 'responsibility', and 'innocence,' posited by the liberal legal state. It thereby uncovers law’s counter-archive as a challenge to established forms of representing and responding to violence.

This collection explores such a question through the lens of the cultural legal studies movement, which proffers a new encounter with the cultural turn in law and legal theory.

Our reading of recent Stolen Generations cases argues that courts prior to the Lampard-Trevorrow (2007) treated consent as an individual act, freely and voluntarily given by a liberal subject. Consent was seen as a legitimate factor that duly activated the powers of the legislation to bring about legal removal, according to Justice Maurice O Loughlin in Cubillo. In the previous Stolen Generations case of Williams, formal consent had barred false imprisonment and trespass on the basis that a child cannot be imprisoned if her mother consented to the removal. This chapter goes further than simply suggesting that Aboriginal consent has been misread by the courts which was clearly the situation until the case of Lampard-Trevorrow. It also proposes that consent was, and is still used in an underhanded way by the state to legitimise its actions and protect itself from liability. After all, most statutory creatures governing the Stolen Generations allowed for removal, irrespective of consent. The state, nonetheless, sought to procure consent in order to rationalise the policy, facilitate removals, and shift the responsibility for removal from the state to Aboriginal parents.

There is a strange English case, one that is also a quintessentially modernist text, which all students of the common law are taught. In this case, Donoghue v Stevenson [1932] AC 562, the House of Lords reformulated the responsibility owed by one person to another in civil society, (despite its legal importance, it is irreverently known as "the-snailin- the-bottle case"). The case has had a hold on the imagination of lawyers ever since it was heard in 1932; but as to why this case matters so much to lawyers, and why it should also matter to modernists, I need to start by telling a story. Like all good stories, this one starts with a journey-Mrs May Donoghue's tram trip from her tenement in the heart of Glasgow to the Welhneadow Cafe in Paisley.

It is often said that feminists, especially radical lesbian feminists, are not funny. Conservatives have levelled lack of humour at feminists as a political weapon, as a sort of baseline attack: the claims of feminists, they have argued, are a bit of a joke, whereas they themselves are not funny. With Judy Grahn, we see this weapon being wielded figuratively in retaliation: not only is her work funny, it is violently funny and both funny and violent. In my reading of two of her poems, 'The Psychoanalysis of Edward the Dyke' and 'I have come to claim', I argue that Grahn's humour plays on elements of camp and violence as a site of political subversion. At the time of writing both poems, during the 1960s, Grahn was very concerned with working-class, feminist, lesbian politics. These concerns arise thematically in her work of the 1960s, where she deals with sexual violence, homosexuality, racism and class politics. My focus here is not so much on thematics but on the aesthetics of Grahn's poetry. How do camp humour and violent imagery articulate her concerns?

Publication of abstract for conference

Why is there such a discrepancy between legal time and historical time? Or rather, whose historical time is tacitly represented and silently justified in legal representations? Whose interests are served by the laws particular fictions and whose injuries are privileged? In exploring these questions I will focus on the 2006 case of In re African- American Slave Descendants, a claim made for reparations for slavery in the U.S. Since the 1980s a number of litigants have filed claims for injuries arising out of slavery and none has succeeded, but these very failures are worth examining for what they reveal about the contemporary inability to reconcile the demands of the past on the present.