This special issue examines how the comic and the icon prefigure forms of legality that are different to modern law. There is a primal seeing of law unmediated by reading, writing or possibly thinking. This introduction identifies the primacy of the eye, the emergence of visual jurisprudence and the transformations of law as a paper-based material practice to a digitally enabled activity.

Albert Camus’ reflection in _The Myth of Sisyphus_ presents the absurd, the intrusion of the meaningless and irrational universe into the order and future focus of modern life. Central to Camus’ reading of Sisyphus and his dammed eternal labour, was time. Camus clearly saw that modernity and modern life was predicated on tensions in time. Moderns perceived, and lived, in the timescale of past-present-future. A commitment to chronology that promised an allusion of meaning within a world of essential meaninglessness. Modern (...) law, the law forged by the structural violence of positivism and sovereignty, shared this commitment to time. However, transitions to the digital are presenting different relationships of law and time. Emergent digital legality manifests a Sisyphean closed loop of repeat, return and enclosure, past and future become a blurred undistinguished present. The modern terror of mundane life that Camus tried to recast, seems intensified and totalised in the digital. However, rather than the possibility of the joy of the absurd, there is something else. Sisyphus, Camus imaged, had weathered to look like his rock, but he never merges with it. But in the unfolding of the digital and its legality, the secure subjectivity that Camus exalted is less then certain. This might not be bad. (shrink)

This article is about time. It is about time, or more precisely, about the absence of time in law’s digital future. It is also about time travelling and the seemingly ever-popular BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who. Further, it is about law’s timefullness; about law’s pictorial past and the ‘visual baroque’ of its chronological fused future. Ultimately, it is about a time paradox of seeing time run to a time when time runs ‘No More!’ This ‘timey-wimey’ article is in (...) three parts. The first part looks to a hazy remembered past of the legal emblem tradition as presented in Peter Goodrich’s Legal Emblems and the Art of Law to learn visual literacy and also to glimpse the essential elements of modern legality with authority, decision and violence. The second part maps how these images and icons of modern legality are manifest in the Doctor Who fiftieth year anniversary special ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The third stage looks beyond these first order meanings to understand the chronological chaos of ‘The Day of the Doctor.’ The technicity of the image as a portal through time and space that the narrative revolves around charts the implications for the digital end of time for law. (shrink)

This article allies the 1997 PlayStation video game Final Fantasy VII with Slavoj Žižek’s writings on ecology to critique the area of legal philosophy known as ‘earth jurisprudence’. Earth jurisprudents argue that law bears a large part of the responsibility for humanity’s exploitation of the environment, as law helps to bar nature from subjectivity. However, as Žižek warns—and as FFVII illustrates—the desire for meaning incites people to manufacture a harmonious vision of nature that obscures the chaotic forces at work in (...) the environment and ultimately absolves humanity of responsibility towards the world. Therefore, earth jurisprudence’s program of using legal rights to limit human intervention should be rejected in favour of an approach that enables people to take an active role in addressing the ecological crisis. (shrink)

This paper examines the forms of life established through the visual governance of the Australian social security mobile app —the Express Plus Centrelink app. It is argued that the app exceeds established accounts of juridical and administrative power. The app involves a seeing that is not public, a responding that is not writing and a de-materialisation of an institution and its disciplinary apparatus. It is argued that the app creates proto-literate subjects that are required to respond to a real-time sequence (...) of images in a highly structured and circumscribed manner to become complicit in the digitalisation of their life. (shrink)

Autopoietic theory is increasingly seen as a candidate for a radical theory of law, both in relation to its theoretical credentials and its relevance in terms of new and emerging forms of law. An aspect of the theory that has remained less developed, however, is its material side, and more concretely the theory’s accommodation of bodies, space, objects and their claim to legal agency. The present article reads Luhmann’s theory of autopoietic systems in a radical and material manner, linking it (...) on the one hand to current post-structural theorisations of law and society, and on the other hand extending its ambit to accommodate the influx of material considerations that have been working their way through various other disciplines. The latter comprises both a materialisation of the theory itself and ways of conceptualising the legal system as material through and through. This I do by further developing what I have called Critical Autopoiesis, namely an acentric, topological, post-ecological and posthuman understanding of Luhmann’s theory, that draws on Deleuzian thought, feminist theory, geography, non-representational theory, and new material and object-oriented ontologies. These are combined with some well-rehearsed autopoietic concepts, such as distinction, environment and boundaries; Luhmann’s earlier work on materiality continuum; more recent work on bodies and space; as well as his work on form and medium in relation to art. The article concludes with five suggestions for an understanding of what critical autopoietic materiality might mean for law. (shrink)

Existing accounts of the early history of Alzheimer’s disease have focused on Alois Alzheimer’s (1864–1915) publications of two ‘peculiar cases’ of middle-aged patients who showed symptoms associated with senile dementia, and Emil Kraepelin’s (1856–1926) discussion of these and a few other cases under the newly introduced name of ‘Alzheimer’s disease’ in his Textbook of Psychiatry. This article questions the underpinnings of these accounts that rely mainly on publications and describe ‘presenility’ as a defining characteristic of the disease. Drawing on archival (...) research in the Munich psychiatric clinic, in which Alzheimer and Kraepelin practised, this article looks at the use of the category as a diagnostic label in practice. It argues that the first cases only got their exemplary status as key referents of Alzheimer’s disease in later readings of the original publications. In the 1900s, the published cases rather functioned as material to think about the limits of the category of senile dementia. The examination of paper technologies in the Munich psychiatric clinic reveals that the use of the clinical diagnosis of Alzheimer’s disease was not limited to patients of a certain age and did not exclude ‘senile’ cases. Moreover, the archival records reflect that many diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease were noted in the medical records as suspicions rather than conclusions. Against this background, the article argues that in theory and practice, Alzheimer’s disease was not treated as a well-defined disease entity in the Munich clinic, but as an exploratory category for the clinical and histopathological investigation of varieties of organic brain diseases. (shrink)

The great work of the psychotic judge Daniel Paul Schreber, namely Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, has received predictable and rather unimaginative interpretations as the discourse of a lunatic. The work has not been studied as a theory of law. Schreber, it is argued here, was an extreme lawyer, a radical melancholegalist, a black letter theorist, a critic avant la lettre, and a radical theorist of an impure jurisprudence.

Transparency’s importance as an administrative norm seems self-evident. Prevailing ideals of political theory stipulate that the more visible government is, the more democratic, accountable, and legitimate it appears. The disclosure of state information consistently disappoints, however: there is never enough of it, while it often seems not to produce a truer democracy, a more accountable state, better policies, and a more contented populace. This gap between theory and practice suggests that the theoretical assumptions that provide the basis for transparency are (...) wrong. This article argues that transparency is best understood as a theory of communication that excessively simplifies and thus is blind to the complexities of the contemporary state, government information, and the public. Taking them fully into account, the article argues, should lead us to question the state’s ability to control information, which in turn should make us question not only the improbability of the state making itself visible, but also the improbability of the state keeping itself secret. (shrink)

Big Data evangelists often argue that algorithms make decision-making more informed and objective—a promise hotly contested by critics of these technologies. Yet, to date, most of the debate has focused on the instruments themselves, rather than on how they are used. This article addresses this lack by examining the actual practices surrounding algorithmic technologies. Specifically, drawing on multi-sited ethnographic data, I compare how algorithms are used and interpreted in two institutional contexts with markedly different characteristics: web journalism and criminal justice. (...) I find that there are surprising similarities in how web journalists and legal professionals use algorithms in their work. In both cases, I document a gap between the intended and actual effects of algorithms—a process I analyze as “decoupling.” Second, I identify a gamut of buffering strategies used by both web journalists and legal professionals to minimize the impact of algorithms in their daily work. Those include foot-dragging, gaming, and open critique. Of course, these similarities do not exhaust the differences between the two cases, which are explored in the discussion section. I conclude with a call for further ethnographic work on algorithms in practice as an important empirical check against the dominant rhetoric of algorithmic power. (shrink)