The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance
The Courtroom as a Space of Resistance

Author: Awol Allo

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 381

ISBN-13: 1317037111

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Fifty years before his death in 2013, Nelson Mandela stood before Justice de Wet in Pretoria's Palace of Justice and delivered one of the most spectacular and liberating statements ever made from a dock. In what came to be regarded as "the trial that changed South Africa", Mandela summed up the spirit of the liberation struggle and the moral basis for the post-Apartheid society. In this blistering critique of Apartheid and its perversion of justice, Mandela transforms the law into a sword and shield. He invokes it while undermining it, uses it while subverting it, and claims it while defeating it. Wise and strategic, Mandela skilfully reimagines the courtroom as a site of visibility and hearing, opening up a political space within the legal. This volume returns to the Rivonia courtroom to engage with Mandela's masterful performance of resistance and the dramatic core of that transformative event. Cutting across a wide-range of critical theories and discourses, contributors reflect on the personal, spatial, temporal, performative, and literary dimensions of that constitutive event. By redefining the spaces, institutions and discourses of law, contributors present a fresh perspective that re-sets the margins of what can be thought and said in the courtroom.

Privilege and Punishment
Privilege and Punishment

Author: Matthew Clair

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2022-06-21

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 069123387X

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How the attorney-client relationship favors the privileged in criminal court—and denies justice to the poor and to working-class people of color The number of Americans arrested, brought to court, and incarcerated has skyrocketed in recent decades. Criminal defendants come from all races and economic walks of life, but they experience punishment in vastly different ways. Privilege and Punishment examines how racial and class inequalities are embedded in the attorney-client relationship, providing a devastating portrait of inequality and injustice within and beyond the criminal courts. Matthew Clair conducted extensive fieldwork in the Boston court system, attending criminal hearings and interviewing defendants, lawyers, judges, police officers, and probation officers. In this eye-opening book, he uncovers how privilege and inequality play out in criminal court interactions. When disadvantaged defendants try to learn their legal rights and advocate for themselves, lawyers and judges often silence, coerce, and punish them. Privileged defendants, who are more likely to trust their defense attorneys, delegate authority to their lawyers, defer to judges, and are rewarded for their compliance. Clair shows how attempts to exercise legal rights often backfire on the poor and on working-class people of color, and how effective legal representation alone is no guarantee of justice. Superbly written and powerfully argued, Privilege and Punishment draws needed attention to the injustices that are perpetuated by the attorney-client relationship in today’s criminal courts, and describes the reforms needed to correct them.

New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice
New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice

Author: Arnaud Kurze

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2019-01-10

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 0253039932

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Since the 1980s, transitional justice mechanisms have been increasingly applied to account for mass atrocities and grave human rights violations throughout the world. Over time, post-conflict justice practices have expanded across continents and state borders and have fueled the creation of new ideas that go beyond traditional notions of amnesty, retribution, and reconciliation. Gathering work from contributors in international law, political science, sociology, and history, New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice addresses issues of space and time in transitional justice studies. It explains new trends in responses to post-conflict and post-authoritarian nations and offers original empirical research to help define the field for the future.

Lawyers in Conflict and Transition
Lawyers in Conflict and Transition

Author: Kieran McEvoy

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-03-17

Total Pages: 437

ISBN-13: 1009234374

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Countries undergoing or recovering from conflict and authoritarianism often face profound rule of law challenges. The law on the statute books may be repressive, judicial independence may be compromised, and criminal justice agencies may be captured by powerful interests. How do lawyers working within such settings imagine the law? How do they understand their ethical obligations towards their clients and the rule of law? What factors motivate them to use their legal practice and social capital to challenge repressive power? What challenges and risks can they face if they do so? And when do lawyers facilitate or acquiesce to illegality and injustice? Drawing on over 130 interviews from Cambodia, Chile, Israel, Palestine, South Africa, and Tunisia, this book explores the extent to which theoretical understandings within law and society research on the motivations, strategies, tactics, and experiences of lawyers within democratic states apply to these more challenging environments.

Bodies of Resistance
Bodies of Resistance

Author: Laura Anne Doyle

Publisher: Philosophy, Literature and Cul

Published: 2001

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780810118478

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An exploration of the traumas and possibilities of embodiment as it is lived in a political world. Unveiling the influence of phenomenology, particularly in that of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, on contemporary thought, it cuts across different disciplines in its analysis.

Critical Criminology in Canada
Critical Criminology in Canada

Author: Aaron Doyle

Publisher: UBC Press

Published: 2011-01-01

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 0774818360

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This book presents the work of a new generation of critical criminologists who explore the geographical, institutional, and political contexts of the discipline in Canada. Breaking away from mainstream criminology and law-and-order discourses, the authors offer a spectrum of theoretical approaches to criminal justice -- from governmentality to feminist criminology, from critical realism to anarchism � and they propose novel approaches to topics ranging from genocide to white-collar crime. By posing crucial questions and attempting to define what criminology should be, this book will shape debates about crime, policing, and punishment for years to come.

The Justice of Visual Art
The Justice of Visual Art

Author: Eliza Garnsey

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020

Total Pages: 249

ISBN-13: 1108494390

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Drawing on novel case studies, this book provides the first substantive theoretical framework for understanding transitional justice and visual art.

Red Zones
Red Zones

Author: Marie-Eve Sylvestre

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2020-01-02

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 1316877574

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In Red Zones, Marie-Eve Sylvestre, Nicholas Blomley, and Céline Bellot examine the court-imposed territorial restrictions and other bail and sentencing conditions that are increasingly issued in the context of criminal proceedings. Drawing on extensive fieldwork with legal actors in the criminal justice system, as well as those who have been subjected to court surveillance, the authors demonstrate the devastating impact these restrictions have on the marginalized populations - the homeless, drug users, sex workers and protesters - who depend on public spaces. On a broader level, the authors show how red zones, unlike better publicized forms of spatial regulation such as legislation or policing strategies, create a form of legal territorialization that threatens to invert traditional expectations of justice and reshape our understanding of criminal law and punishment.

Political Trials in Theory and History
Political Trials in Theory and History

Author: Jens Meierhenrich

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2017-02-27

Total Pages: 451

ISBN-13: 1108107656

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From the trial of Socrates to the post-9/11 military commissions, trials have always been useful instruments of politics. Yet there is still much that we do not understand about them. Why do governments use trials to pursue political objectives, and when? What differentiates political trials from ordinary ones? Contrary to conventional wisdom, not all political trials are show trials or contrive to set up scapegoats. This volume offers a novel account of political trials that is empirically rigorous and theoretically sophisticated, linking state-of-the-art research on telling cases to a broad argument about political trials as a socio-legal phenomenon. All the contributors analyse the logic of the political in the courtroom. From archival research to participant observation, and from linguistic anthropology to game theory, the volume offers a genuinely interdisciplinary set of approaches that substantially advance existing knowledge about what political trials are, how they work, and why they matter.

A Theory of African Constitutionalism
A Theory of African Constitutionalism

Author: Berihun Adugna Gebeye

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 273

ISBN-13: 0192893920

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A Theory of African Constitutionalism asks and seeks to answer why we need a new theoretical framework for African constitutionalism and how this could offer us better theoretical and practical tools with which to understand, improve, and assess African constitutionalism on its own terms. By locating constitutional studies in Africa within the experiences, interactions, and contestations of power and governance beginning in precolonial times, the book presents the development and transformation of African constitutional systems across time and place, along with the attendant constitutional designs and practices ranging from the nature and operation of the African state to its vertical and horizontal government structures, to its constitutional rights regime. This title offers both a theoretically and comparatively rich, historically and contextually informed, and temporally and spatially extensive account of the nature, travails, and incremental successes of African constitutionalism with detailed case studies from Nigeria, Ethiopia, and South Africa. A Theory of African Constitutionalism provides scholars, policymakers, governments, and constitution builders in Africa and beyond with new insights for reimagining the purpose, substance, and scope of constitutions and constitutionalism.