To this end, writes Osiel, we should pay closer attention to the way an experience of administrative massacre is framed within the conventions of competing theatrical genres. Defense counsel will tell the story as a tragedy, while prosecutors will present it as a morality play. The judicial task at such moments is to employ the law to recast the courtroom drama in terms of a "theater of ideas," which engages large questions of collective memory and even national identity. Osiel asserts that principles of liberal morality can be most effectively inculcated in a society traumatized by fratricide when proceedings are conducted in this fashion.

In recent decades the debate among scholars, lawyers, politicians and others about how societies deal with their past has been constant and intensive. 'Legal Institutions and Collective Memories' situates the processes of transitional justice at the intersection between legal procedures and the production of collective and shared meanings of the past. Building upon the work of Maurice Halbwachs, this collection of essays emphasises the extended role and active involvement of contemporary law and legal institutions in public discourse about the past, and explores their impact on the shape that collective memories take in the course of time. The authors uncover a complex pattern of searching for truth, negotiating the past and cultivating the art of forgetting. Their contributions explore the ambiguous and intricate links between the production of justice, truth and memory. The essays cover a broad range of legal institutions, countries and topics. These include transitional trials as 'monumental spectacles' as well as constitutional courts, and the restitution of property rights in Central and Eastern Europe and Australia. The authors explore the biographies of victims and how their voices were repressed, as in the case of Korean Comfort Women. They explore the role of law and legal institutions in linking individual and collective memories in the transitional period through processes of lustration, and they analyse divided memories about the past and their impact on future reconciliation in South Africa. The collection offers a genuinely comparative approach, allied to cutting-edge theory

Events such as the global financial crisis have helped reveal that the drivers and contours of governance on a national and international level remain a mystery in many respects. This is so despite the ever-increasing complexity and sophistication in the management and understanding of economic, legal and political spheres of global society. Set in this context, this timely Research Handbook is the first to explicitly address the constitutive relationship between law and political economy. With scholarly contributions from diverse disciplinary and geographic backgrounds, this authoritative book provides an expansive overview of the legal architecture of the global political economy. It covers, in three parts, topics surrounding money and markets, the relations of organization, and commodities, land and resources. Scholars and policymakers as well as undergraduate and postgraduate law students interested in the intersection of socio-political, economic, and legal dynamics of governance will find this book a thought-provoking and insightful resource.

Law in the modern era is one of the most important of our society's technologies for preserving memory. In helping to construct our memory in certain ways law participates in the writing of our collective history. It plays a crucial role in knitting together our past, present, and future.The essays in this volume present grounded examinations of particular problems, places, and practices and address the ways in which memory works in and through law, the sites of remembrance that law provides, the battles against forgetting that are fought in and around those sites, and the resultant role law plays in constructing history. The writers also inquire about the way history is mobilized in legal decision making, the rhetorical techniques for marshalling and for overcoming precedent, and the different histories that are written in and through the legal process.The contributors are Joan Dayan, Soshana Felman, Dominic La Capra, Reva Siegel, Brook Thomas, and G.

Breaking the Cycle of Mass Atrocities investigates the role of international criminal law at different stages of mass atrocities, shifting away from its narrow understanding solely as an instrument of punishment of those most responsible. The book is premised on the idea that there are distinct phases of collective violence, and international criminal law contributes in one way or another to each phase. The authors therefore explore various possibilities for international criminal law to be of assistance in breaking the vicious cycle at its different junctures.

In the last few decades, there are few concepts that have rivaled "collective memory" for attention in the humanities and social sciences. Indeed, use of the term has extended far beyond scholarship to the realm of politics and journalism, where it has appeared in speeches at the centers of power and on the front pages of the world's leading newspapers. Seen by scholars in numerous fields as a hallmark characteristic of our age, an idea crucial for understanding our present social, political, and cultural conditions, collective memory now guides inquiries into diverse, though connected, phenomena. Nevertheless, there remains a great deal of confusion about the meaning, origin, and implication of the term and the field of inquiry it underwrites. The Collective Memory Reader presents, organizes, and evaluates past work and contemporary contributions on collective memory. Combining seminal texts, hard-to-find classics, previously untranslated references, and contemporary landmarks, it will serve as a key reference in the field. In addition to a thorough introduction, which outlines a useful past for contemporary memory studies, The Collective Memory Reader includes five sections-Precursors and Classics; History, Memory, and Identity; Power, Politics, and Contestation; Media and Modes of Transmission; Memory, Justice, and the Contemporary Epoch-comprising ninety-one texts. A short editorial essay introduces each of the sections, while brief capsules frame each of the selected texts. An indispensable guide, The Collective Memory Reader is at once a definitive entry point into the field for students and an essential resource for scholars.

The first serious academic study of obituaries, this book focuses on how societies remember. Bridget Fowler makes great use of the theories of Pierre Bordieu, arguing that obituaries are one important component in society's collective memory. This book, the first of its kind, will find a place on every serious sociology scholar's bookshelves.

A review and analysis of existing scholarship on the different national traditions and on the various modes and subjects of law and humanities.

This book elaborates a new framework for considering and understanding the relationship between law and memory. How can law influence collective memory? What are the mechanisms law employs to influence social perceptions of the past? And how successful is law in its attempts to rewrite narratives about the past? As the field of memory studies has grown, this book takes a step back from established transitional justice narratives, returning to the core sociological, philosophical and legal theoretical issues that underpin this field. The book then goes on to propose a new approach to the relationship between law and collective memory based on a conception of ‘legal institutions of memory’. It then elaborates the functioning of such institutions through a range of examples – taken from Japan, Iraq, Brazil, Portugal, Rwanda and Poland – that move from the work of international tribunals and truth commissions to more explicit memory legislation. The book concludes with a general assessment of the contemporary intersections of law and memory, and their legal institutionalisation. This book will be of interest to scholars with relevant interests in the sociology of law, legal theory and international law, as well as in sociology and politics.

Combining the practical knowledge of a renowned director with the perspective of a historian and media specialist, Christian Delage explores the conditions and consequences of using film for the purposes of justice and memory by examining archival footage from war crime trials from Nuremberg to the present.