We are honored to announce that this year’s keynote speakers will be two distinguished scholars:
- Professor Thomas Giddens, Dundee Law School, University of Dundee
- Professor Peter Goodrich, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University
KEYNOTE LECTURES
Peter Goodrich: In ludo lex
As new technologies and social media remove the art of play from the experience of childhood, legality also seems to be increasingly divested of the sensibility of the game of law. In ludo lex will explore the history of the legal artem ludicram, of the bans, infamia, and institutional controls of body and expression that were deemed necessary to maintain both the distinctiveness and the visibility of the game of law. In the first section of Justinian’s Codex, it is stipulated that those who do not move like us are mad (dementes vesanoques), a portenteous restraint and instruction that endeavours to mark body and gesture as visible signs of following – of walking in the path – of the law (sequentes legem), and imposing infamia or civil death upon the heretical and outlaw bodies that move and dance differently. Taking up this theme in Roman civil law, I will trace the jealous relation of law to body, gesture, movement, dance, games and play, a sexpartite division, as it impacts the common law and its theatres of legal action.