Law's Documents: Authority, Materiality, Aesthetics

Illuminating their breadth and diversity, this book presents a comprehensive and multidisciplinary view of legal documents and their manifold forms, uses, materialities and meanings. In 1951, Suzanne Briet, a librarian at the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, famously said that an antelope in a zoo could be a document, thereby radically changing the way documents were analysed and understood. In the fifty years since this pronouncement, the digital age has introduced a potentially limitless range of digital and technological forms for the capture and storage of information. In their multiplicity and their ubiquity, documents pervade our everyday life. However, the material, intellectual, aesthetic and political dimensions and effects of documents remain difficult to pin down. Taking a multidisciplinary and international approach, this collection tackles the question, what is a legal document?, in order to explore the material, aesthetic and intellectual attributes of legal documentation; the political and colonial orders reflected and embedded in documents; and the legal, archival and social systems which order and utilise information. As well as scholars in law, documentary theory, history, Indigenous studies, art history and design theory and practice, this book will also appeal to those working in libraries, archives, galleries and museums, for whom the ongoing challenges of documentation in the digital age are urgent and timely questions.

table of content

Introduction: Law’s Documents (Katherine Biber and Trish Luker)

Part 1: The Documentary Form

1. The Look of Scholarship (Bonnie Mak)

2. Historio-Graphic Strategies: Visual methods for Interpreting Historical Documents (Anne Burdick, Kate Sweetapple and Jacquie Lorber-Kasunuc)

3. Identity Signs: The Signature in Law (Trish Luker)

4. The Historian as Document Producer: A Critical Reflection on the Production of Oral History Timed Summaries (Jess Adams-Stein)

5. In Case I Die in This Mess: Documentary Challenges for Wills (Katherine Biber)

Part 2: Documents and State Power

6. Materialising International Legal Agreement - Treaty Documents (Jessie Hohmann)

7. Passport Struggles: Lawful Documents, Biometrics and Indigenous Sovereignty (Sara Dehm)

8. What is a Bogus Document? Refugees, Identity and Judging Documents Under Australian Immigration Law (Anthea Vogl)

Part 3: Indigenous Challenges Through Documents

9. Powerful Documents: Nyungar Ancestors Letters from the Archive (Darryl Kickett and Anna Haebich)

10. Stolen Generations: Re-Documenting a Usable Past (Georgine Clarsen)

11. When Records Speak We Listen: Conversations in the Archive (Natalie Harkin and Jeanine Leane)

13. Forty-Nine Most Common Words (Alison Whittaker)

MPart 4: The Visual and Material Power of Documents

14. The Aesthetic Archive: Appropriating Legal Documents in Visual Art (Carolyn McKay)

15. Inadequate Images: Material Violence, Redaction and Pixilation in the Stasi Archive (Donna West Brett) 16. Rape Contract (Shevaun Wright) 17. Works of art/works of law (Carey Young)