Monday, 17 August 2015

Not sure exactly what constitutes Cultural Legal Studies?

Check out our new edited collection: 

Cassandra Sharp and Marett Leiboff (eds) Cultural Legal Studies: Law's Popular Cultures and the Metamorphosis of Law (Routledge, 2015) 

Now available: Check it out here


What can law’s popular cultures do for law, as a constitutive and interrogative critical practice? This collection explores such a question through the lens of the ‘cultural legal studies’ movement, which proffers a new encounter with the ‘cultural turn’ in law and legal theory. Moving beyond the ‘law ands’ (literature, humanities, culture, film, visual and aesthetics) on which it is based, this book demonstrates how the techniques and practices of cultural legal studies can be used to metamorphose law and the legalities that underpin its popular imaginary. By drawing on three different modes of cultural legal studies – storytelling, technology and jurisprudence – the collection showcases the intersectional practices of cultural legal studies, and law in its popular cultural mode.










The contributors to the collection deploy differentiated modes of cultural legal studies practice, adopting diverse philosophical, disciplinary, methodological and theoretical approaches and subjects of examination. The collection draws on this mix of diversity and homogeneity to thread together its overarching theme: that we must take seriously an interrogation of law as culture and in its cultural form. That is, it does not ask how a text ‘represents’ law; but rather how the representational nature of both law and culture intersect so that the ‘juridical’ become visible in various cultural manifestations. In short, it asks: how law’s popular cultures actively effect the metamorphosis of law.

Cassandra Sharp and Marett Leiboff
Legal Intersections Research Centre
Faculty of Law Humanities and the Arts
University of Wollongong

Sunday, 22 February 2015


Call For Papers – GLR (2015) 24(3)

Griffith Law Review
A Review Dedicated to the
Socio-Legal, Inter-disciplinary, Critical and Theoretical Study of Law

Editor-in-Chief – Professor William MacNeil
Managing Editors – Dr Edward Mussawir & Dr Timothy Peters

The Griffith Law Review: Law Theory Society has a proud history of publishing innovative and engaging socio-legal, inter-disciplinary and critical legal research. Our focus is international and we engage with worldwide issues and agendas. In recognition of the Review’s standing as a leading journal, it was ranked A* by the Australian Research Council for the 2010 Excellence in Research for Australia Initiative.
The Review is pleased to announce the following publishing opportunity for 2015.
 (2015) 24(3) Symposium
Through the Looking Glass: the Framing of Law and Justice through Popular Imagination
Symposium Editor: Cassandra Sharp
Deadline for manuscripts: 30 March 2015
This special edition is designed to explore the connected themes of legal storytelling and the visual image of law and justice in popular culture.  Following Alice, who contemplates, and then explores, the world on the other side of the looking glass, this special edition calls upon scholars to reflect on and encounter the concepts of law and justice as broadly framed within popular imagination via the portal of popular cultural texts. Alice goes through the looking glass to find a world both clear and recognizable yet inverted, or refracted, and so too, this symposium sought to explore stories and images of law in popular culture that are familiar, yet at the same time often turned strange.

Within this theme, scholars can investigate and revisit issues that map the contemporary discipline of law and pop culture – with its different dimensions and relations to legal knowledge, law practice and jurisprudence. The special edition seeks to allow for broad coverage under topics such as:

·       The role of legal storytelling in transforming, mirroring, creating, and sustaining legal consciousness.
·       The framing and/or distortion of law within popular images and narratives.
·    The transformation and circulation of meaning in relation to perceptions of justice, and/or how justice (dis)connects with law.
·       The (de)mystification of law through popular stories.

Submissions are invited for this Symposium Edition, which can be between 8,000 and 10,000 words in length, addressing any issue broadly conceived within this theme.

Dr Cassandra Sharp (Symposium Editor)

Submissions to the journal can be made at the following web address:

For more information concerning the GLR contact:
Dr Ed Mussawir & Dr Tim Peters
Managing Editors
Griffith Law Review
Email:
glr@griffith.edu.au
Website:
www.griffith.edu.au/criminology-law/griffith-law-review