Jane Rosenberg, Press Waits for Jury to Reach Verdict in “Cannibal Cop” Trial (2013)
Where Law Lives
Witnessing the Birth of the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities
BY: PAUL VAN BENTHEM AND WILL KUNIMOTO
Imagine a typical scene of a criminal trial. You arrive at the courthouse, perhaps as a law student invited to observe the proceedings. Entering the courtroom, you take a seat on a bench in the gallery, and look out at the scene before you, past the barrier and onto the stage. Directly in front of you sits the accused, dressed in orange prison garb, leaning forward in their chair. Ahead to your right sits the crown prosecutor, to their left, the counsel for the accused. An assortment of grave-faced jurors sit in silence further to the left against the wall. Elevated, a black-robed judge surveys the courtroom from behind an oaken bench. The judge calls the court to order, the trial begins, and you are now the observer of the law at large.
Over the course of the trial, those who rise to speak tell a story. These stories turn on their conceptions of justice and fairness. In turn, the Court considers these stories, deliberates over them, and finally, comes to a conclusion. Judgement is passed, and the actors disperse. You, the observer, walk away with your own impressions of law, justice, and society. You have taken part in an inherited cultural happening, steeped in ceremony, rhetoric, and emotion. You have been witnessed to law as story, as language, and as a cultural event.
Law and humanities scholarship reflects this dynamic way of thinking about law, keenly attuned to how we access, visualize, and experience where law lives. This leads to explore the sites of law beyond courtrooms and other institutional settings. At its heart, law and humanities is an interdisciplinary approach that is attentive to law’s aesthetic, sensorial, and performative qualities. Its areas of study include law and literature, law and emotions, law and film, law and language, cultural and feminist approaches to law. From a pedagogical perspective, engaging with law through these lenses forms part of a more dynamic legal education, one that can familiarize future lawyers to law’s existence as a constellation of storied practices, images, and language alive to reinterpretation and experimentation.
Although law and humanities networks are active internationally in the US, the UK, and Australasia, there are no such official associations in Canada. A virtual workshop in May of 2021 gathered together academics from universities across Canada to envision the creation of the Canadian Network of Law and Humanities, for facilitating ongoing scholarship engaging humanities disciplines with legal discourse. The academics represented a myriad of arts-based scholarship and pedagogies, drawing on, among others, literature, film critique, visual arts, and dance as ways of revealing in law that which is perhaps afforded less attention within standard western legal education.
Beyond offering a space for those attending to share their ongoing research, the workshop presented an opportunity to discuss the challenges and possibilities of doing law and humanities in Canada. Some cited an institutional lack of familiarity with the field as a barrier to research funding and visibility. With regards to incorporating humanities and arts-based practices into law classrooms, the discussion turned towards how to familiarize students with methodologies that purposefully break rank with standard legal pedagogy.
The workshop helped to pool and disseminate the participating professors’ collective experiences and strategies. Despite the challenges associated with turning against the institutional tide of the law school, it became quickly apparent that engaging with law and humanities approaches in the classroom provided the opportunity to hold up a mirror to these institutional standards and open them up to critique.
This built towards a key question that law and humanities poses: what kinds of lawyers are law schools producing? Students who have been trained to see law primarily in the text of statutes and judicial decisions may struggle to recognize other expressions of law, such as oral histories and dance. This narrow understanding of law can and has been put to the service of colonialism through the subversion and negation of Indigenous law. Scholars doing work in the field of law and humanities unsettle this view by using the humanities to draw out a broader spectrum of relationships intrinsic to the law, revealing how the legitimacy and force of law is culturally contingent. Embracing this legal pluralism positions law and humanities to engage seriously with Indigenous legal principles and processes as legitimate forms of law.
Ultimately, the workshop offered a look at what a law and humanities network may offer in Canada. An established network would answer the call for greater visibility of the field, and open opportunities for collaborative research. The sharing of teaching resources could pave the way for more deeply establishing humanities and arts-based practices in the classroom. The Canadian Network of Law and Humanities marks the upward trajectory of a growing community of scholars who offer refreshing perspectives and seek to change how we think about law; all the diverse ways of understanding and living the law.