Terror in the Texts: Technology – Law – Future

This paper is concerned withlaw's failure and need to manifest theessentiality of technology for the West. Thiswill be shown through a critical reading of therelated fictional and juridical projects ofAmerican golden age science fiction and spacelaw. This analysis involves sensitivity to theterrors that bind together technology, law andthe future. It is argued that cornucopia, thevictory of modernism through technology, ispresented in science fiction and space law asterrorised by its other – dystopia. Thisterrorising means that cornucopia activelyresists dystopia. However, this resistiveenterprise is flawed – cornucopia never escapesdystopia. Alternative images of humanity andtechnology are needed to escape these flawedimaginings of the West. The paper concludesthat the cyborg offers the potential for aregenerative thinking about technology and law.     

Seeing Law: The Comic,Icon and the Image in Law and Justice

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.     

The Australian constitutional referendum of 1999: evaluating explanations of republican voting

The Constitutional Referendum of November 1999 saw Australians reject a republic and vote to retain the British Monarch as Australian Head of State. Multivariate analyses of data from the Australian Constitutional Referendum Survey were employed to examine the impact of social background, political and social movement leadership, political knowledge and political trust on the referendum vote. Younger, secular, highly educated and Labor partisans, and those who evaluated republican political and social movement leaders positively, were more likely to vote for constitutional change. Republican voting was stronger also, among those more trusting of politicians. The Yes vote was associated positively with higher cognitive skills and greater voter knowledge of political and constitutional issues, highlighting the salience of political education processes for the outcome of referenda.     

Interrogating absence: the lawyer in science fiction

This article argues that whilst concepts of law and justice can be seen as prominent in much science fiction, the role of lawyer is mostly absent. This article interrogates these absences and asks whether they can be traced back to contemporary concerns around professional ethics. Three potential absences are noted; firstly, justice is considered as immanent. In these fictional futures lawyers have become unnecessary due to the immediacy of the legal system. The second conceptualisation portrays lawyers as intertwined with corporate interests. In these speculative moments lawyers have become culturally indistinguishable from other types of corporate entities. The final science fictive texts highlight a desire for the lawyer-hero. In these texts justice is overwhelmingly absent and shows a continuing need for legal professionals. Each of these cultural moments presents important questions for current understandings of professional ethics and the regulatory systems in which they are based. A removal of lawyers from our shared understandings of the future is indicative of potential problems with perceptions of professional ethics in the present.     

F#ck Your Family!: The Visual Jurisprudence of Automobility

This paper considers the popular visual jurisprudence of bumper stickers. Drawing upon a sample sticker/driver/vehicle assemblages observed at the Gold Coast, Australia in 2014, we argue that the meanings and messages projected by the assemblages have a significant legal dimension. The argument is located at the intersection of past research into bumper stickers, increased scholarly interest in the relation of law to automobility and especially recent considerations of the popular visual jurisprudence of the motor vehicle, its cultures and semiotics. In particular we argue that the sticker/driver/vehicle assemblage represents an engagement with law and legality. We suggest this goes beyond immediate denotations of brands with intellectual property or flags and the sovereign nation state to more essential engagement with consumer capitalisms law of the image, the friend/enemy distinction, the ouroboros of rights and the essential legality of living in a polis.     

The Visiocracy of the Social Security Mobile App in Australia

This paper examines the forms of life established through the visual governance of the Australian social security mobile app (application)—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.     

Law,the Digital and Time: The Legal Emblems of <Emphasis Type="Italic">Doctor Who</Emphasis>

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.     

A Maelstrom of Bodies and Emotions and Things: Spectatorial Encounters with the Trial

This paper explores spectatorial encounters with criminal trials. Particularly focusing on the 2018 work of Australian contemporary visual artist Julie Fragar that followed her watching murder trials in the Supreme Court of Queensland, it is argued that the artist as a legal outsider grapples with the inhumanity of the trial. This grappling can go in two directions. For some there is a need to bring the human back, to see the person beneath the mask of the role that they are performing, to connect the gothic horror of the trial back to a redeeming humanism. For others, and this is evident in Fragar, the horror of the inhumanity is visceral and overpowering, and the grotesque masque of judgment needs to be witnessed. Both perform a corrective and critique to the business as usual of processing, judging and stamping onto human lives that is legal insider’s performance in the criminal trial.

     

The Car as Avatar in Australian Social Security Decisions

This paper draws upon automobile semiotics and legal semiotics to argue that the car in Australian social security decisions becomes an avatar for the applicant that is then decoded into meaning streams concerning deservingness and prudence. It is suggested that this has two implications. The first it highlights the techniques where by a technical object (the car) and the ‘life’ of the applicant became bridged in law; and through that bridging life becomes ‘formatted.’ The second highlights the extent of automobile culture. The car has meaning beyond the highways and parking lots. The paper shows how these meanings have become integrated into processes of biopolitical governance.