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.

While every law student must study torts, not every torts student has the same experience. More than 30 universities in Australia offer this subject, in courses of different lengths, focusing on different torts delivered by different methods, and assessed in different ways. The most common assessment is the open-book exam, which requires students to answer hypothetical problem-solving questions and discuss essay-type questions. No matter how these courses are designed and delivered, every student’s journey has common aspects, and this chapter aims to help you to navigate through your course by focusing on the issues that concern all students. This book is written primarily for students who may not yet have developed the full range of study techniques that lead to success in their legal studies. Torts is a fascinating subject of study but, because it is frequently taught in the first year of law, students sometimes struggle – not because they cannot understand the law or because they are not interested in the law, but because they do not know how to study the law effectively. This chapter explains how to organise your study so that you can achieve the results that you deserve.

On 27 April 2015, Jamie Maynard and Courtney Penix met in a strip mall parking lot in Columbus, Ohio, a city in the Midwestern United States (US). Earlier that day, Courtney had sent Jamie a series of text messages asking if she could get her $150 worth of heroin. Jamie said that she could, plus two ‘rigs’ (equipment to inject the drug), for $175 total. They arranged to meet that evening to make the trade before Jamie headed to work at a local casino. Jamie and Courtney, both White women in their mid twenties, met earlier that spring through a friend-of-a-friend. They initially connected to exchange drugs: heroin, to which both had developed habits, and the pharmaceuticals Suboxone, used to ease painful opioid withdrawal symptoms, and Xanax, used to ease anxiety and sometimes used in combination with opioids to amplify the effects of the drugs. They quickly developed a casual friendship, communicating regularly by text messages and phone calls. They vented about their jobs, shared stories about their struggles to maintain their drug habits, and offered drugs to one another to keep each other ‘well’ (i.e., to stave off withdrawal) (Williams, 2020).

The control of alcohol and other drugs (AOD) is an important feature of the global public policy landscape. There is widespread recognition that the ‘war on drugs’, rooted in international systems of drug control, has failed both on its own terms and because of the harms it has visited upon users and their communities. Although some states have moved towards liberalisation, the vast majority continue to heavily invest in punitive measures. Importantly, however, key ideas about drugs are coming under sustained pressure, and in some instances, beginning to break down, including the idea that drugs inevitably produce harms, including illness, injury and death, or that they produce other predictable, stable and consistent ‘effects’ (Fraser and Moore, 2011). There is evidence of this change in specific contexts including drug policy, health promotion and service provision. But what is happening in law courts? How are drugs being conceptualised in legal cases around the world? Scholars from a variety of disciplines have taken a keen interest in the ‘drug problem’, but there has been little scrutiny of how key cases in different jurisdictions have influenced the ways in which we understand, respond to and punish the use of various substances. The importance of such decisions extends beyond criminal matters and affects outcomes in a variety of legal spheres including immigration, welfare, family justice, education and employment law. Judging Drugs is the first book to chart the impact and significance of those cases in different parts of the world, and to consider how ideas about drugs are (or might be) changing across our courts. It thus comprises an important and distinctive addition to a body of scholarship that has sought to understand the ways in which drugs and ‘addiction’ have been subject to varying degrees of control and opprobrium. Importantly, contributors to this edited collection do not simply identify and summarise important legal cases from around the world. In this sense, the collection is not a ‘textbook’ of important case law. It is also not a textbook of cases with apparent precedent value.

A juridical commentary to this provision further states: ‘[t]hat which is protected is to be worth more than that which is harmed and the danger is not to be avoidable through any other means’ (Anonymous, 2025, see: https://lagen.nu/1962:700#K24).

Causation is arguably the most complex of the elements of negligence. It is covered in three sections in this chapter. Section 13.1 covers the criteria for identifying a recognisable harm and the nature of causation in tort law – what type of explanation does it look for? Section 13.2 covers the evolution of the methods adopted by Australian courts to identify factual causation. Section 13.3 discusses the difficult normative challenge of putting a limit on the extent (or ‘scope’) of a defendant’s liability.

Because this area of the law of negligence is extremely complex, the chapter includes two sets of ‘Summary points’ and two ‘Test your understanding’ features. At the end of the chapter, you will find an appendix with the provisions on causation adopted in the civil liability legislation in each state and territory.

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.

The introductory chapter presents an overview of the classical doctrine of civil war and discusses some of the reasons for studying them. It argues that some doctrine of civil war is an inevitable component of any international legal system. Observing how the doctrine of civil war that existed in the age of sail and steam has come to seem rather opaque and remote in the present day, this study aims to offer modern readers a valuable review of that past tradition and to help them remember how such a doctrine once came to be and what happened to it. At the same time, the purpose of the book is not to argue for a revival of or return to the classical law, but rather to better understand the aspirations and limitations of the law of past generations, which may not be too unlike those of our own times.

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.

Alcohol and other drug use (AOD) use tends to hold a privileged position within legal decision-making (Seear, 2020; Flacks, 2023), and the criminal case of R v Taj (2018) was no exception. The defendant, who was – it was agreed by all parties – experiencing paranoia and psychosis, launched a violent attack on a man he suspected of being a terrorist. Mr Taj had been drinking on eve of the incident, and the night before that, but tests on the day found no trace of alcohol in his bloodstream. He was nevertheless unable to plead self-defence on the basis that he honestly believed there was a risk to life and limb because, successive courts argued, he was already at fault for drinking alcohol, which led to the psychotic thoughts. There were some significant and potentially far-reaching claims in the case, including that intoxication-related behaviour does not require the presence of alcohol in the body, and that psychosis can be caused by alcohol alone. This allowed the court to conclude that Mr Taj was wholly responsible for his actions and so could not claim excuse or mitigation.