Reading Group - 'Form'

Gustav Klimt image
Image: Gustav Klimt, Jurisprudenz (1903-07)

'Form, which seems self-sufficient and self-defining, is restless, tendentious, a noun lying in wait for its object.' (Angela Leighton)

'Form is everything. It is the secret of life.' (Oscar Wilde)

In semester 2, we asked why 'form' might matter for law and legal critique. Expanding our discussion on genre, thinking with 'form' provokes questions of repetition and tradition, content and style. We read texts which challenge the potential (and limitations) of disciplinary forms and methods – texts which make us question how we make meaning, how we make judgments and how writing practices form and re-form our ways of knowing the world.

The reading group for Semester 2 was co-convened by Laura Petersen and Shaun McVeigh.

Semester 2

Wednesday 3 August 2022
Room G01

Caroline Levine, Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (Princeton University Press, 2015)
Introduction: The Affordances of Form

Chapter available here.

Wednesday 17 August 2022
Room 920
  1. M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Wesleyan University Press, 2008)
    Poems in the section: Os
    Notanda
    Gregson v Gilbert 

    Poems and text are available here.
  2. Alison Whitaker, Blakwork (Magabal Books, 2018)
    Poems:
    'of the' (p51-53)
    'the skeleton of the common law' (p 101-103)

    Poems available here.
Wednesday 31 August 2022
Room 920

Lauren Berlant, 'On the Case' (2007) 33 (4) Critical Inquiry 663-672

Article available here.

Wednesday 14 September 2022
Room 920

Didi Herman and Connal Parsley (eds) Interdisciplinarities. Research Process, Method and the Body of Law (Palgrave MacMillan, 2022)
Introduction
Chapter 7: Connal Parsley, ' Working with an Example of the Body: Legal Thinking as Method in Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies'

Introduction and Chapter available here.

Wednesday 5 October 2022
Room 920

China Miéville, The Commodity-Form Theory of International Law' (2004) 17 (2) Leiden Journal of International Law 271-302

Article available here.

Wednesday 19 October 2022
Room 920

Raimond Gaita, 'The Universality of International Criminal Law and the Idea of a Common Humanity' in Raimond Gaita and Gerry Simpson (eds), Who's Afraid of International Law? (Monash University Publishing, 2017) 169-190

Chapter available here.