Abstract
I am really pleased that this issue of LCH takes up the relationship between law and music. Turning to music as a prism to think about law opens up a conversation about the social and cultural lives, meanings, and effectivity of law’s varied enactments or performances. The language of enactment and performance directs attention to text as well as context, role and action, without privileging the word over the world or the world over the world.
It draws attention to the human actions that go into giving a performance, thinking not only about texts and language, but staging, symbolization, relation to audience. Here we might think about law as a domain for exploring the desires that performances seek to satisfy and the pleasures that legal performances provide. As Sandy Levinson has suggested, “The basic idea is that law, music, and drama … are similar … insofar as they involve the transformation of ink on a page – call it a statute, a score, a script – into complex social action.”
Judges interpreting a statute must take account of their audience, anticipating its likely reactions, staging their decisions in such a way as to enable particular connections between the law’s pronouncement and the pleasures that audience members may be expected to derive from the performance of law. Conductors of symphony orchestras may begin with the score, but they also concern themselves with the skills of the musicians they work with and the expectations of their audience, with staging, with sound, with the way the score can be enacted and, through its enactment, brought to life.
Thinking about law as performance requires us to engage with performance practices of various legal actors, some of whom produce and interpret texts, some of whom seem less textually engaged. The essays in our Commentary Section on “Law and Music” observe, document, analyze and theorize about the various performance practices of law and the meaning-making processes of performance itself.