Judgment is simple, right? This book begs to differ. Written for all students of the law—from undergraduate to supreme court justice—it opens the reader to a broad landscape of ideas surrounding common law judgment. Short and accessible, it touches upon the many pathways that lead out from the phenomenon of judgment in common law jurisdictions. This book is unique in its brevity and scope. It engages not only with the core operation of judgment as legal decision, but considers questions of authority and reason, and broader issues of interpretation, rhetoric, and judicial improvisation. The aim of this book is not to present a summary of research or a comprehensive ‘theory’ of judgment, nor is it bounded by the divisions of different legal subjects. Instead, it is a handbook or companion for students of the law to read and return to in their studious journeys across all common law topic areas, providing readers with a robust and open-ended set of tools, combined with selected further readings, to facilitate their own discovery, exploration, and critical analysis of the rich tapestry of common law judgment.

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of resistance in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey, but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure - and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores the resistance to that structure, including: different ways in which law's pedagogic structures might be incomplete, or are being fought against; the use of less conventional elements of cultural discourse to resist the abstraction of the lawyer in students' subject formation; the centralisation of queer and feminist discourses to disrupt the hierarchies of the legal curriculum; the use of digital technologies; the place of embodiment in legal education settings, and the impacts of post-human knowledges and contexts on legal learning. Assembling original, field-defining essays by both leading international scholars as well as emerging researchers, it constitutes indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

Taking up the study of legal education in distinctly biopolitical terms, this book provides a critical and political analysis of structure in the law school. Legal education concerns the complex pathways by which an individual becomes a lawyer, making the journey from lay-person to expert, from student to practitioner. To pose the idea of a biopolitics of legal education is not only to recognise the tensions surrounding this journey, but also to recognise that legal education is a key site in which the subject engages, and is engaged by, a particular structure - and here the particular structure of the law school. This book explores that structure by addressing the characteristics of the biopolitical orders engaged in legal education, including: understanding the lawyer as a commodity, unpicking the force relations in legal education, examining the ways codes of conduct in higher education impact academic freedom, as well as putting the distinctly western structures of legal learning within a wider context. Assembling original, field-defining, essays by both leading international scholars as well as emerging researchers, it constitutes indispensable resource in legal education research and scholarship that will appeal to legal academics everywhere.

Judgment is simple, right? This book begs to differ. Written for all students of the law-from undergraduate to supreme court justice-it opens the reader to a broad landscape of ideas surrounding common law judgment. Short and accessible, it touches upon the many pathways that lead out from the phenomenon of judgment in common law jurisdictions. This book is unique in its brevity and scope. It engages not only with the core operation of judgment as legal decision, but considers questions of authority and reason, and broader issues of interpretation, rhetoric, and judicial improvisation. The aim of this book is not to present a summary of research or a comprehensive 'theory' of judgment, nor is it bounded by the divisions of different legal subjects. Instead, it is a handbook or companion for students of the law to read and return to in their studious journeys across all common law topic areas, providing readers with a robust and open-ended set of tools, combined with selected further readings, to facilitate their own discovery, exploration, and critical analysis of the rich tapestry of common law judgment.

Contributions by Paul Fisher Davies, Lisa DeTora, Yasemin J. Erden, Adam Gearey, Thomas Giddens, Peter Goodrich, Maggie Gray, Matthew J. A. Green, Vladislav Maksimov, Timothy D. Peters, Christopher Pizzino, Nicola Streeten, and Lydia Wysocki. Recent decades have seen comics studies blossom, but within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root - assumptions around the particular methods used to approach the comics form, the ways we should read comics, how its ""system"" works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish. These approaches question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. In this edited collection, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine comics by addressing materiality and form as well as the wider economic and political contexts of comics' creation and reception. Through this lens, influenced by poststructuralist theories, contributors explore and elaborate other possibilities for working with comics as a critical resource, consolidating the emergence of these alternative modes of engagement in a single text. This opens comics studies to a wider array of resources, perspectives, and modes of engagement. Included in this volume are essays on a range of comics and illustrations as well as considerations of such popular comics as Deadpool, Daredevil, and V for Vendetta, and analyses of comics production, medical illustrations, and original comics. Some contributions even unfold in the form of comics panels.

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about - and reshape - the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics' multimodality - its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics - opens understanding of the limits of law's rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic 'beyond'. This mask of knowing remains haunted - by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives - an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.

The intersections of law and contemporary culture are vital for comprehending the meaning and significance of law in today's world. Far from being unsophisticated mass entertainment, comics and graphic fiction both imbue our contemporary culture, and are themselves imbued, with the concerns of law and justice. Accordingly, and spanning a wide variety of approaches and topics from an international array of contributors, Graphic Justice draws comics and graphic fiction into the range of critical resources available to the academic study of law. The first book to do this, Graphic Justice broadens our understanding of law and justice as part of our human world-a world that is inhabited not simply by legal concepts and institutions alone, but also by narratives, stories, fantasies, images, and other cultural articulations of human meaning. Engaging with key legal issues (including copyright, education, legal ethics, biomedical regulation, and legal personhood) and exploring critical issues in criminal justice and perspectives on international rights, law and justice-all through engagement with comics and graphic fiction-the collection showcases the vast breadth of potential that the medium holds. Graphic Justice will be of interest to academics and postgraduate students in: cultural legal studies; law and the image; law, narrative and literature; law and popular culture; cultural criminology; as well as cultural and comics studies more generally.

Establishing the medium of graphic fiction as a critical resource for interdisciplinary legal studies, this collection is the first to address the intersection of comics and law. Graphic fiction has gained enormous cultural capital and academic interest over recent years. Comics-inspired films fill our cinemas and superhero merchandise fills the shelves of supermarkets. In short, our culture is suffused with a comic-book aesthetic: as, for example, the Occupy movement appropriates the mask of V, from the comic work "V for Vendetta"; and, tragically, as James Holmes s murderous rampage through a Colorado movie theatre, seemingly sees him styling himself after Batman s arch-nemesis, the Joker. From mass entertainment and consumerism to political activism and violence, we are surrounded by emanations of graphic storytelling. Meanwhile, the rise of academic disciplines such as comics studies demonstrates that the medium contains much more depth than the common assumption of its simplicity and juvenility might suggest." "Against this background, comics offer an important resource for making sense of the contemporary place and role of law. Whether in their representations of lawyers and the legal system, their dystopian imaginations, their treatment of issues of justice and social order, or in their superheroic investment in the protection of the innocent and the punishment or capture of those who would harm them, like other narrative forms literature, film, theatre graphic fiction explores and expresses human life in all its social, moral and legal complexity. In the context of a now well established interest in cultural legal studies, this book showcases the critical potential of comics and graphic fiction as a resource for interdisciplinary legal studies and legal theory. "

In a world of globalised media, Japanese popular culture has become a signifi cant fountainhead for images, narrative, artefacts, and identity. From Pikachu, to instantly identifi able manga memes, to the darkness of adult anime, and the hyper- consumerism of product tie- ins, Japan has bequeathed to a globalised world a rich variety of ways to imagine, communicate, and interrogate tradition and change, the self, and the technological future. Within these foci, questions of law have often not been far from the surface: the crime and justice of Astro Boy; the property and contract of Pokemon; the ecological justice of Nausicaa; Shinto's focus on order and balance; and the anxieties of origins in J- horror. This volume brings together a range of global scholars to refl ect on and critically engage with the place of law and justice in Japan's popular cultural legacy. It explores not only the global impact of this legacy, but what the images, games, narratives, and artefacts that comprise it reveal about law, humanity, justice, and authority in the twenty-first century.

What are the implications of comics for law? Tackling this question, On Comics and Legal Aesthetics explores the epistemological dimensions of comics and the way this once-maligned medium can help think about - and reshape - the form of law. Traversing comics, critical, and cultural legal studies, it seeks to enrich the theorisation of comics with a critical aesthetics that expands its value and significance for law, as well as knowledge more generally. It argues that comics' multimodality - its hybrid structure, which represents a meeting point of text, image, reason, and aesthetics - opens understanding of the limits of law's rational texts by shifting between multiple frames and modes of presentation. Comics thereby exposes the way all forms of knowledge are shaped out of an unstructured universe, becoming a mask over this chaotic 'beyond'. This mask of knowing remains haunted - by that which it can never fully capture or represent. Comics thus models knowledge as an infinity of nested frames haunted by the chaos without structure. In such a model, the multiple aspects of law become one region of a vast and bottomless cascade of perspectives - an infinite multiframe that extends far beyond the traditional confines of the comics page, rendering law boundless.

Contributions by Paul Fisher Davies, Lisa DeTora, Yasemin J. Erden, Adam Gearey, Thomas Giddens, Peter Goodrich, Maggie Gray, Matthew J. A. Green, Vladislav Maksimov, Timothy D. Peters, Christopher Pizzino, Nicola Streeten, and Lydia Wysocki. Recent decades have seen comics studies blossom, but within the ecosystems of this growth, dominant assumptions have taken root - assumptions around the particular methods used to approach the comics form, the ways we should read comics, how its ""system"" works, and the disciplinary relationships that surround this evolving area of study. But other perspectives have also begun to flourish. These approaches question the reliance on structural linguistics and the tools of English and cultural studies in the examination and understanding of comics. In this edited collection, scholars from a variety of disciplines examine comics by addressing materiality and form as well as the wider economic and political contexts of comics' creation and reception. Through this lens, influenced by poststructuralist theories, contributors explore and elaborate other possibilities for working with comics as a critical resource, consolidating the emergence of these alternative modes of engagement in a single text. This opens comics studies to a wider array of resources, perspectives, and modes of engagement. Included in this volume are essays on a range of comics and illustrations as well as considerations of such popular comics as Deadpool, Daredevil, and V for Vendetta, and analyses of comics production, medical illustrations, and original comics. Some contributions even unfold in the form of comics panels.