ABSTRACT
Law bears more than a few striking resemblances to drama, largely grounded in Aristotelian rules and prescriptions for drama and tragedy. To reiterate Jacques Ranciere, law creates through denumerability, calculable forms of causation, and reshapes the untamed into designated forms of existence. Law’s dramatic pretence attempts to protect the legal interpreter from the unruliness of the body. The lawyer’s lifeworld is held in the body, through training that points us to notice, or fail to notice, what law holds within it. The law reports turned oral judgments and the aides-memoires of the commonplace books and annotations, private and collective, on paper and dispersed through discussion, into a literary form, creating narrative expectations of judgment. The influence of the neoclassical on law, in combination with the formalisation of empiricism and rationality, strips anything other than the literal from the protection of property rights in copyright law.
