This chapter focuses on the expressive functions of tears, the face and the body on the early modern stage, to probe the deep relation between drama and the law, including their entwined but distinct investments in natural self-evidence and the rhetoric of presence. Through an interdiscursive approach, it shows how drama mines the complexities of hypokrisis through an engagement with the radical performativity at the core of law, and offers the provocation that law’s disknowledges are turned into a poetic condition of theatrical knowledge, and a forging of subjecthood and inwardness that complicates the distinction between the fiction of theatre and the reality of the law court. It ends with the suggestion that the theatre looks at, as well as beyond, the vivid invisibilities of judicial encounters to unpack the epistemic, affective and ethical impulses structuring the ‘scene’ of law.

Arendt’s engagement with the Eichmann trial raises questions that lie at the theoretical heart of international criminal justice. Do criminal trials of atrocity crimes (“core crimes”) differ in their aims from trials for ordinary domestic law crimes? Does it even make sense to try individuals for collective crimes? What is the point of courts jumping into the political maelstrom of mass violence? This chapter addresses these questions. It examines Arendt’s defense of the Eichmann trial against charges of unfairness and illegitimacy. It addresses Antony Duff’s argument that the moral community of “humanity” has no authority to stage criminal trials, as well as Martti Koskenniemi’s critique of Arendt’s individualist focus. Arendt rejected the concept of collective criminal guilt, although she endorsed a concept of collective political responsibility; the chapter analyzes this distinction. An additional question is whether Arendt’s thinking sheds light on the modern practices of international criminal law. Here, the verdict is mixed. Arendt strongly objected to the political and pedagogical aims of criminal trials, which I argue is a mistake on her part, even on her own terms. The radical ambitions of international criminal justice – to save history against inevitable future denialism, and to demystify extreme political violence – are actually Arendt’s as well, whether or not she recognized it.

This chapter introduces the main themes of the book: Hannah Arendt’s investigations of moral judgment and legal accountability. In 1933, she watched moral judgment collapse on a massive scale in Germany. Multitudes were swept away by conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific ideologies; Nazi morality swiftly upended traditional standards of moral decency. What could account for it? And how do some people keep their judgment intact in a corrupted culture? Understanding the nature of moral judgment became a central question of Arendt’s moral philosophy. Beyond this, she asks how the law should judge perpetrators who commit crimes against humanity, not out of greed or malice but because their leaders tell them it is the right thing to do, and their larger society seems to agree. The book analyzes these and other questions of moral and legal theory. This introduction provides a roadmap to the chapters that follow.

The epilogue to this book is a brief reflection on the relevance of Arendt’s moral philosophy to the current slide toward autocracy in many countries, including my own. Unlike the other chapters of this book, the epilogue is “time-stamped” to the moment of its writing: the first year of a US administration that openly aims to dismantle liberal institutions and inflate the president’s prerogative powers. It describes a set of events that poses moral problems resembling those that preoccupied Arendt in her “emergency ethics.”

This chapter examines a series of court cases in Hong Kong in which a number of newly elected legislators were disqualified from taking office in part because the ways in which they took their oaths during the swearing-in ceremony were deemed too flamboyant, too extravagant and too theatrical to be taken seriously. Implicit in the legal and political objections to their oath taking is the view that theatre has no place in the hallowed chambers of the law courts or the legislature, a view that is all the more surprising given the intertwined histories and representational strategies between law and theatre. Taking these cases as a starting point, I explore what may be at stake in this legal anti-theatricality, and argue that law’s determination to expurgate the theatrical could be read as part of an attempt to render invisible its own performative nature.

The study of law suggests that its performances, largely through the format of trials, take place behind the closed doors of courtrooms. Little of the exterior would seem to intrude upon its routines and, vice versa, little of what might constitute law’s performativity occurs outside of its bounded architectural habitat. Yet this has not always been the case. Numerous examples of outdoor performances provide a rich study into the siting of legal performance. The argument presented in this chapter is that it was initially the outside that provided the primary stage and staging of law. Asserting the presence of law across the various and remote parts of the realm required performances of its majesty on the very surface of the earth. It required acts heralding, inscribing and publicising common law as the law of the land and so it was the land that had to become the physical platform and the scene of its delivery. The evolution of common law depended upon the rudiments of landscape, on the plotting of the countryside, and on the elemental matter of the earth. Such features formed a stage on which the emergence of common law not only took place but was very much performed.

Quintilian suggests that law be learned in significant part a comicis, from the usages, customs and comedies of everyday life. Starting out from the theatrical and foundational form of a legal dialogue between sovereign and philosopher on pedagogy, the body, letters and images, this chapter examines the fabrication of common law in terms of what the barrister Blount coined as comediography (comœdiographus). In whirl and jig, lawyers and playwrights of comedies share a trajectory from conflict to resolution, disruption to decision, that provides a harmonious conclusion for the audience if not necessarily the actors.

This chapter and Chapter 9 offer a detailed reading of central arguments in The Human Condition. A striking fact about this study of the “active life” is the absence of any discussion of morality, apart from minimum obligations to keep promises and forgive unintended consequences of action. The chapter sets out the problem, and then offers a conjecture about what moved Arendt to neglect morality: her fear that moral constraints would handcuff human action, which in her view makes life meaningful. The following chapter analyzes that conjecture in depth. The remainder of this chapter sets the stage by examining central themes and vocabulary in The Human Condition. It explains what Arendt means by “human condition”, unpacks her concepts of labor, work, and action and the risks of confusing them, and explains why the human condition of natality (“unto us a child is born”) matters so crucially.

In conversation with Peters’s Law as Performance, I suggest paying closer attention to dialogue as one central element of performance itself. In this contribution, I analyze the configuration of affective spaces based on the characteristics of dialogue in legal settings, from legislation to inquisitorial cases.