Judicial authority through the experiences of crisis

Abstract

This article is concerned with law’s experiences and making sense of crisis. When we talk about law’s response to crisis, we refer to law not as an abstract set of rules but as an embodied and animated assemblage of relations and practices. This way, law needs to make sense of any crisis to respond to it. The article draws on cultural legal studies to explore the constitution of judicial authority in the context of a democracy in flux. The article relies on fieldwork data collected in the interviews conducted by the author with Lithuanian judges in 2019. Highest in more than two decades, public trust in the judiciary in 2018 indicated a remarkable achievement for Lithuania, a country whose judicial system had been in a state of flux since the end of the Soviet era. However, after an unprecedented and highly mediated judicial corruption scandal in 2019, the rates of public trust plummeted, uncovering complex dynamics between the image of courts, mass media, and the public. Against this backdrop, the article explores how judges make sense of crisis that develops on the intersections of provocative reality judging and formal judicial institutions. It shows how judicial authority is constituted in the conditions of crisis on the tension between law and culture. Emerging from a crisis of authority is the changing face of judging. A post-colonial vantage point and theatrical jurisprudence are used to respond to a development of a desire of power under a mask of rationality, objectivity, and universality. The article concludes by contemplating how this authority shapes our lifeworlds.

1 Introduction

This article seeks to contribute to the debates on humanising practices in law, in particular on the role of ‘intermedial experiences’¹ in the context of crisis. The main concern of legal storytelling is the humanising role of the stories,² or, to put it more elegantly, ‘it is the function of juris literature to wrest law away from the exclusive control of sclerotic traditions of repetition and the pickle jar of precedent'.³ Narrative jurisprudence argues for stories of the other ⁴ as a ‘way of education and caution’ for legal self,⁵ yet as law is increasingly staging itself,⁶ the performance turn in law demands theatrical presence that is material and embodied.⁷ The new field of theatrical jurisprudence focuses on the legal self and draws on post-dramatic theatre practices to develop tools for training in performance.⁸ Drawing on theatrical jurisprudence, I understand body as memory;⁹ therefore, the process of negotiation of jurisprudential challenges through intermedial experiences could be seen as helping ‘to understand what prudence demands … or training in performance’.¹⁰ To demonstrate how legal self is shaped through the experiences of crisis, I use fieldwork data collected through interviews with Lithuanian judges conducted in 2019. Highest in more than two decades, public trust in the judiciary in 2018 indicated a remarkable achievement for Lithuania,¹¹ a country whose judicial system had been in a state of flux since the end of the Soviet era. However, after an unprecedented, extremely controversial, and highly mediated judicial corruption scandal in 2019,¹² the rates of public trust plummeted, uncovering complex dynamics between the image of courts, mass media, and the public. Through the judges’ imaginations prompted by the mediated encounter, this article brings into conversation, abstraction and lived experiences. It shows participants’ experiences in the context of the corruption scandal, and how their stories reveal judicial authority as embodied and shaped through liveliness grounded in spatial and temporal circumstances. First, I will look at how diverse expectations of the role of media inform imaginings of the role of the judge shaped through the tension between fiction and reality. Against this backdrop, I will explore how, in response to crisis, specific forms of judicial authority have emerged and developed in these conditions, paying close attention to my role as researcher in the intermedial encounter. Finally, I will draw on theatrical jurisprudence to respond to the emerging forms of judging.

2 (Trans)formation of judicial authority through the experiences of crisis

In this section, I focus on the participants’ responses in the smallest focus group discussion and several individual interviews with judges as well as a creator of one of the shows¹³ to explore how engagement with popular culture shapes legal selves and practices of law in crisis. The purpose of interviewing Lithuanian judges was to understand the reception and reproduction of judicial authority in response to the fictional courtroom television programmes Culture Court and Court,¹⁴ and media in general. Participants in the interview were shown a decision in a civil case as announced in the 28 February 2003 episode of the Lithuanian television show Court, which aired during 2001–2004 (production company Just.tv), and the verdict announced in the 09 March 2018 episode of the Lithuanian television show Culture Court, aired 2017–2018 (production company Pradas). Though Court’s and Culture Court’s productions happened in significantly different contexts, the production companies chose the same cultural form of expression. Court fits perfectly a genre described as courtroom television shows; it even closely resembles the popular American television show Judge Judy.¹⁵ While Court’s publicity campaigns insisted that the portrayed court procedure was real,¹⁶Culture Court openly declared that it was not a real court.¹⁷ Moreover, since visual law’s manifestations participate in the enactment of the normative world,¹⁸ lawyers are encouraged to engage with law’s creation of the world through images.¹⁹ Law depends on the techniques of ‘eros or drama of the screen’²⁰ to stage itself.²¹ In this context, engagement with the television courtroom programmes, as the agents of ‘law’s popular culture’,²² provides possibilities for exploring the politics of such staging. After viewing extracts of these shows, the participants were invited to reflect on the judicial role through unstructured interviews or focus group discussions.

The representation of participants is as follows: the focus group consisted of exclusively post–European Union accession (2005) trained judges,²³ while no individual interviews were conducted within this cohort. The male and female distribution is almost equal, with three male judges and three female judges, as well as one female television creator.

2.1 Staging judicial authority

The judges’ engagement with popular culture prompted them to reflect on their role. As I mentioned at the outset, the participants were invited to respond to unstructured questions. For example, question four invited their reflection on the effects of such shows, while question five asked participants to imagine the ideal judge to be portrayed on a hypothetical show. When participants were asked to reflect on the effects of such court programmes as Court and Culture Court, the following discussion developed in the smallest focus group.

Judge Reed [simultaneous talk]: I mean the court fiction is unnecessary.

Judge Dallas: Yes, yes.

Judge Reed: … the impression, image of a judge is sufficiently demonstrated in the news reporting and so on.

Judge Dallas: Yes.

Judge Reed: Here is real life. And fiction should remain entertainment. But the question is: do we need it? Perhaps, from our position, we don’t need it [sighs]. But, well, we can’t dismiss that the movies are being created for the public with their own interpretations. Then perhaps …

Judge Charlie: Yes, I once even saw in a movie that they had to bring a certain [bribe] for someone [simultaneous talk]. Yeah, right, I thought.

Judge Reed [simultaneous talk]: Yes, so such an impression. And perhaps …

Judge Charlie: A certain [bribe] had to be delivered [laughing].

Judge Dallas: Well, now we have voice recorders, and during the evaluation of the judicial practice, the procedure of your communication in court is evaluated and voice recordings are being listened to [by the evaluators]. So, I will say, an image should be appropriate in that show if we want an entirely real representation.²⁴

Participants contrasted court fiction with news reporting, and entertainment was rejected as being able to generate a sense of verisimilitude, yet it was recognised as a contributor to the court’s image. The Lithuanian judges’ acceptance of a realistic portrayal of courts in the news media contrasts with the Australian public’s critical perceptions of the reality portrayed in news reports.²⁵ Note how Judge Dallas animated the voice recorder to evoke the real court. Voice recorders were introduced to replace court records in Lithuanian courts in 2010,²⁶ and this technology also made an appearance in other participants’ imaginings of court. In contrast to Judge Dallas’s imagining, Judge Ride rejected the voice recorder as a suitable trope for court portrayal:

You would not really portray the real work of the court. For example, voice recordings are made, each court procedure is recorded. I don’t know about public broadcast of those records, that doesn’t make sense. Streaming video is also not an option, but perhaps the episodes. But I suppose [it could be] educational programmes about the court procedure, problems, actualities, perhaps changes in the legislation. Given a thought it could be clothed. I could not even say now, there could be even an imitation of a courtroom. But it requires, how to put it, a subtle taste. It is not for everyone … [laughing].²⁷

In Judge Ride’s comment, the work of the real court is also tied to a voice recorder, and the staging of the court image is motivated by the education of the public. Notice the literary articulation of the expected staging through the use of the metaphor of ‘clothe’. It is a Lithuanian expression, and the closest English translation would be ‘to endow especially with power or a quality’.²⁸ Used with regard to an imagined programme, this metaphor indicates the importance attributed to staging.

After looking more closely into the details of imagined programmes, it could be argued that the object of staging is to evoke deeper truths that could not be found by the participants in Court and Culture Court. In contrast to verisimilitude concerns manifested in the comments just discussed, Judge Finley’s imagining of staged authority implies that despite the constructedness of a programme, the participation of real persons and discussion of real actualities would fulfil the educational function:

For example, the programme The Right to Know.²⁹ Well, it concerns politics, other issues but a lawyer Šindeikis participates. Even though he has journalistic connections to magnates, they deal with legal topics and legal professionals take part. So, in such places I would see more constructive education [pause] educational function of television. Because it happens among real people, after all. Not modelled, created situations but a real discussion that is an actuality. [That could] be a scandal, or elections or [something] else.³⁰

In this comment, imaginative staging elides the division between fiction and reality. Here the real ‘embodies a form of depth ontology by which reality is equated with forms of deeper truth’.³¹ Seen this way, Judge Finley’s articulation of imagining reminds one of the phenomenon known in studies of visuality in law as the ‘iconic logos [that] constitutes a normative or aesthetic-dogmatic framework of images, which also functions as cohesion of social experience’.³² It is claimed to operate through ‘image and picture as well as the visual and every consciously created figurative form, from medieval textiles to the illustrated press of the early twentieth century’.³³

Deeper truths also concern Judge Ride, in particular the myth of rationality in staging the iconic logos:

My main demand is that a person should be intelligent. That intelligence shines through.… That person would be able to talk not only about courts’ actualities. But of course, judges are restricted from speaking on wider topics besides the arts and culture because judges are prohibited from involvement in the political life and have plenty of other restrictions.³⁴

The desire to reinforce the quality of intelligence is in tension with judicial restrictions, yet both Judge Ride and Judge Finley shape the public staging through experts and communication. Their shared concern is to prevent ‘speaking what is not needed’,³⁵ and ‘not jeopardising the stature of courts but having something to say and knowing how to say it’.³⁶ These politics of staging could be better understood as emerging in the staging of authority in the circumstances of the corruption scandal. So, section 2.2 turns to the insights of the critique of judicial corruption in popular culture and the ambiguity of the corruption phenomenon.

2.2 Corruption

In this section, the staging of authority in the context of crisis is explored through the responses of the participants to the role of media in representing corruption. Corruption, like any crisis, has the potential to disorient, and theatre practices may provide training that could be necessary in ‘the cultural condition of our time: the endurance of the chaos that surrounds us’.³⁷ I borrow from the research on theatre intermedial experiences the concept of intermediality, the experience of which is

an active embodied process of negotiating and shifting between different and conflicting medial realities, moving in and out of perceptual worlds, relating different impressions and signs, looking for a point of connection that might integrate the confusing and disturbing sensations in a meaningful whole, however unstable and ephemeral this whole may be.³⁸

Adapting this framework for the analysis of participants’ responses enables me to show how the underlying ambiguities of the corruption phenomenon create conditions for negotiation of the role of a judge through intermedial experiences. Interestingly, the reluctance to consider corruption is ascribed to an American series,³⁹ and the participants in this research shared this hesitancy. In the extract from the focus group discussion presented at the beginning of section 2.1, Judge Charlie shared a memory of corruption portrayed in the movies. Other focus group participants did not respond to her memory, while Judge Dallas even reoriented the conversation towards voice recorders as the safeguards of good judging. This silence, as well as Judge Charlie’s sarcastic remark and laughter, indicate an uncomfortable confrontation even when corruption is portrayed in fiction. A similar distancing is present in the creator Sage’s comment:

Can you imagine if that programme was made to be serious, and lay judges as jury could be attracted. Television is such a powerful weapon; a lot could be done. And [to say] no to any political party because they look after themselves and their own interests. But politics are the same everywhere. But those people, for example from the justice system. But the justice system, have you heard what happened? They say that they have known what has been happening for 20 years. I have known too, so what? So why did you, who has known, do nothing? But lay people, they understood … that it is impossible for a judge to make such an unjust decision. Isn’t this so? And he has nowhere to turn. I must have confused you.⁴⁰

In this comment, Sage acknowledges creating confusion for me as researcher. I suggest that this could be seen as an intermediate experience, created when Sage dislocated political interests in the global context. This enables me to notice how the notion of trust is disturbed and state institutions become the other. Spatial displacement is also an invitation to search for connection in other cultures. I entwine reality and fiction⁴¹ by turning to the recent research on Australian popular culture, where it is argued that:

Australian popular culture has been more open than its American counterpart to judicial corruption explorations. This is portrayed as a failure by an individual judge, rather than by the legal system itself. It is predominantly in these cases of judicial corruption that the idea of American Realism that, who the judge is matters, is sadly borne out.⁴²

Crofts’s interrelation of American Realism and the visibilisation of individual accountability through corruption makes me aware how Sage’s comment starts with imagination as visual modality and shifts to cognitive awareness. From this intermedial encounter my point of connection emerges as performance. I draw on a practice of montage from theatrical jurisprudence to further explore legal body and the role of media when the intermedial encounter is practised in the context of crisis. To do so, I must briefly sketch the conditions surrounding the Lithuanian judicial corruption scandal. The political discourse condemned the bias of the whole system: According to Prosecutor General Edvinas Pasilis, ‘It was a system…. What we found was that, in an attorney’s office trading in justice was taking place.’⁴³

The media visuals portrayed close-ups of the individual judges and their handcuffed hands.⁴⁴ Criticising an approach to corruption communication, Rima Urbonaitė, a member of the Selection Commission of Candidates to Judicial Office, noted an alleged use of the scandal for political purposes.⁴⁵

Corruption as an ambiguous multidisciplinary phenomenon could be further contextualised through the differences existing in the culture of corruption. For example, Stupnianek and Navickas illustrate that ‘a bribe in India is viewed as corruption only if it exceeds the market level of bribes, whereas in the US, any kind of bribe is viewed as corruption.’⁴⁶ These researchers place the Lithuanian culture of corruption in context, but also relate this culture ‘to the occupation of the Baltic States by the Soviet Union during the period from 1944 to 1990’.⁴⁷ Indeed, only towards the end of the Soviet era, and to the disbelief of the viewers, was critique allowed in mass media:

Soviet television broadcast numerous 60 Minutes-type exposés on corruption both within the government and the Party…. the mass media … publicized what was wrong rather than what was right in the country. Opinions which in the past could lead to imprisonment, banishment, or even death were regularly expressed on television news programs.⁴⁸

This brief entanglement of historical and material circumstances provides the background for further analysis of the responses of the judges that could be unpacked as intermedial experiences opening spaces to rethink the judicial role in the context of crisis.

2.3 Intermedial experiences of crisis

Having provided the background for further analysis, I now ask how individual judges make sense of the crisis and how this in turn shapes their role in conditions where the division between fiction and reality is elided. This section explores how specific forms of judging have emerged and developed through the experiences of a crisis of authority.

At the beginning of this article, I drew on the existing research to argue that theatrical practices can be employed for training in prudence, yet it is necessary to remember the warning of theatrical jurisprudence that Aristotelian drama also counts on story ‘to be displayed or “played”’.⁴⁹ I will use the two individual interviews as well as the focus group discussion to compare how stories, framed through corruption, were shaped.

The corruption issue mostly emerged at the very end of the interviews, after I had asked participants to add what they deemed to be important. However, in the interview with Judge Finley, a concern with the scandal was raised in the evaluation of the effects of fictional judging shows and featured until the end of the conversation:

They used to say that not just a fly, but a person can be killed with a newspaper. So, the same with the shows. When you know what presumption of innocence is among the public and how they believe what has been told. Nobody cares that after five-four years [detained judges] will be acquitted. It’s been already told to you: ‘Detained’. The handcuffing, detentions are not in vain. That’s it. Nobody treats innocents like that, but where is it said that he is guilty? Yes, from this angle, we are still in the Stone Age. The [education] should start from the ABC, not from the tales that mess up the minds more. For a while the society was silent, I used to think how clever, wise they were, while silent. But when the public has spoken—sorry. I understood that silence is better, it is gold.⁵⁰

In this comment, the corruption is entangled in rhetorically rich framing. By transferring the ability to kill from the newspapers to reality judging, Judge Finley opens the space for the staging of the corruption event as an ‘intermedial experience’.⁵¹ The judge uses a murderous metaphor to articulate the power of mass media. In this way, he animates an interplay of the present and the past, reaching to the Stone Age. Furthermore, by evoking handcuffing, Judge Finley interrelates rhetoric with visual modality, and animates a political–aesthetic nexus. Presumption of innocence is problematised in the context of the trials by media, but such trials also echo Soviet practices of justice. The Soviet justice principle of public case hearings played out through court proceedings in front of numerous members of the public aimed at indoctrination of communist values, substantial educational impact, and elimination of the causes and conditions for similar offences.⁵² In this context, Judge Finley’s interrelation of the past to the present through the emergence of the critical popular voice, draws attention to the negotiation of the relationship with audiences underpinned by the legacy of the past.

Similarly, corruption was framed through the experiences of crisis in the focus group discussion:

Judge Reed: I need to think what else you could have asked us. Perhaps you could have asked how we evaluate ourselves in the context where we are shown. Well, you asked how we feel …

Researcher: What it means for you …

Judge Dallas: What those shows mean for us …

Judge Reed: What it means for us in the context of the current [corruption] events, how judges feel themselves. Obviously, trust in courts, public image of courts plummeted. We see the tenacious negative public opinion. At least, certainly, in the court corridors, when I personally walk, where people sit [sighs], and you, passing by in the judicial dress, hear various comments. Now people have reached the level where we hear [sighs] such comments that next time it is going to be a shame to admit where you work.

Judge Charlie: Ugh.

Judge Reed: Because various interpretations start immediately, and various not suspicions but of the kind ‘you are all the same’ or ‘crows do not pick crows’ eyes.’ So perhaps you could have asked more about how the judges feel not only in the context of these shows, but in the context created by the mass media in general. Because Gill, you have noticed very well that the public is interested in the negative, but not where we create added value, where the court actually solves important and significant disputes for the public. That is shown very fragmentarily and does not attract greater attention.⁵³

This comment is also an illustration of the negotiation of intermedial experience. Judge Reed’s insistence on feelings was despite the attempts by Judge Dallas and me to reorient him towards meaning at the start of this interaction. This shows how positivist legality, which I have been trained into, is competing with sensibilities that shape politics.⁵⁴ Note how Judge Reed shifts from the public arena to the corridors of the court. Then, after developing a sense of shame in response to public negative opinions, he returns to the political arena with the metaphor of crows. This metaphor was used in the 2012 State of the Nation Address by President HE Dalia Grybauskaitė:

Fighting corruption in the judiciary—considered impossible until now—has now become possible. The practice of closed-door agreements between judges was uncovered in Kaunas. Models of dishonest interaction between judges and defence lawyers were exposed in Vilnius. But the old, flawed system based on the principle ‘Crows do not pick crows’ eyes’ continues even today. A fellow prosecutor will get only probation for his first bribe, and trial delaying tactics are still used.⁵⁵

The metaphor is usually employed in the public discourse to critique the self-governance and autonomy enjoyed since Lithuanian independence⁵⁶ by the judiciary, certain public institutions, media, and until 2010 the academic community;⁵⁷ it implies the lack of accountability.⁵⁸ In the individual interview, Judge Finley also used the same metaphor to shape intermedial experience that invites problematisation of the judicial role with regard to the tension between politics and law in conditions of crisis:

Who will hear this case of [judicial corruption]? That means your destiny, one way or another. And it is unclear which political forces will come to power. Will they look at you as a judge who fulfilled his duty, or will they look politicised? Or even more frightening as if you haven’t fulfilled your duty. And that ‘Crows do not pick crows’ eyes’. That means the end for you. Or it would be best to resign. For, actually, the situation is so unstable, it is irrelevant what the Constitution says, what the laws say … when the Chair of the National Security Committee … encourages distrust in courts and rebellion.… And now these judge or judges, who imposed those detentions, who tolerated the handcuffs, it is not vengeance but from a professional aspect: ‘Have you stood against the challenge?’ Challenge of tension, surprise, inflicted commotion. It is not easy to respond unequivocally.⁵⁹

Here, Judge Finley also refers to the public comment by the Chair of the National Security Committee Vytautas Bakas, who said, ‘I was not convinced by the court decision.… I encourage to appeal against it.… I trust the special agencies,’⁶⁰ and called for court reform after a defamation case was decided against the Lithuanian National Security Department.⁶¹ Judge Finley evokes the image of the handcuffs again as he moves between the responsibilities of the role and public politics. This creates an intermedial experience of legal crisis and a feeling of threat posed by the political powers and colleagues who face the challenge of judging their own kind.

Likewise, Judge Ride also employs the rhetorical elegance of storytelling. However, he is concerned with the lost justice and truth, as well as evocation of the justice system being played:

Obviously, the whole community of judges accepted very painfully those events [associated] with corruption where eight colleagues got caught. But again, it would be very interesting for me what really happened there. For now, it is all being silent and no comments. Only it’s clear that courts’ ratings have dropped, and as a judge you feel guilty for everybody. And I wish to believe that the new president will bring new waves. For, you know, there used to be a system when I started to work. You know, I told myself that where else can justice be? If there is no truth in the court, where can the truth be then?… And like one of my favourite sayings that a fish starts rotting from its head. So, when such rules of a game come from the top, then nothing is right [clears throat] at the bottom [knocks]. And say, the Judicial Selection Commission … ranks about 28 candidates … and then brings to the President. The President stabs with her finger … how can she know while seated in her palace who is … not a fool as such but still not fit for promotion.… From the outside it may seem for someone, and before obviously possibly it was that you are a judge, and you can effectively carry out authority and a lot depends on you. Now we are, how to say, small bolts in a big mechanism.⁶²

This story is rhetorically rich: a multisensory metaphor of rotting fish is used to connect past to present. Also, the waves of revolution are wished upon the stabbing finger of a sovereign in the palace. Besides rhetoric, Judge Ride’s bodily reactions of uncomfortable clearing of the throat, and tapping of fingers, feelings of guilt and pain further contribute to the sensibilisation of encounter. However, intermedial crisis experiences here are not connected to the media or ignorant masses but rather to the political bodies.⁶³ By associating the legal system then and now, Judge Ride creates temporal disturbance and destabilises the understanding of the role of a judge.

Now I turn to the focus group to illustrate how the judicial role was reshaped in the intermedial encounter. Aiming to help the research, Judge Dallas interconnected social media platforms and television shows, creating an interplay of judicial role and technology:

I want to help you, if you have to do comparative analysis, Netherlands are the most advanced. Their judges have Facebook, Twitter accounts. There is even a mediation show with a real retired judge, it also plays an educational [function]. It could be very helpful for you because the Netherlands example is a complete opposite from us. For our trust in courts is one of the lowest while in the Netherlands it is the highest. And they are open to public, and they have the possibility to know all the required information in the courts by pressing one button. They are very technologically advanced.⁶⁴

This dislocation disturbs the judicial role in various contexts and actualises the important role of the audience in the legitimation of the relationship. I suggest that this role is shaped through the interweaving of positivist legality with a technocratic thread, underpinned by belief in the lack of transparency. However, in this focus group, reimagination of authority and abjection of the judicial body were resisted by two other judges. Note how Judge Charlie’s comment returns to the judicial body and senses:

Judge Charlie: [You could have asked] are we satisfied with our achievements, our job.

Researcher: OK, are you satisfied? [laughing]

Judge Charlie: Are we really where we should be, in our sleighs or something like that? [laughing]

Researcher: So, are you?

Judge Charlie: Personally, I am satisfied with what I achieved in many years and what the steps of my career show. I really feel that I am where I should be, and I am satisfied with my job, and I am proud of my job.⁶⁵

A metaphor of sleighs invokes the sensorial shaping of judicial authority through the kinaesthetic modality, and sensations of satisfaction and pride interplay in this embodied authority. It could be seen in juxtaposition to Judge Reed’s shame with regard to the job. Moreover, note how Judge Charlie emphasises a feeling of being where she should be. But what this self-reflective understanding of a role lacks becomes visible in Judge Gill’s reshaping of the role of a judge. Note how she interrelates judicial performance to diverse audiences:

Actually, sometimes it is painful to make a decision as you are making it. Though at that time it seems correct because it corresponds to law, justice, morality, and everything else. But perhaps humanly it sometimes feels not quite right and after that a person uh a judge has to suffer a lot. So perhaps that side also needs to be shown, not just how a court procedure [laughing] is being led. So [people] would not think that here is some kind of privilege that gives us high status. Because, at least in my opinion, and as far as I know, my colleagues, we first of all value it as duties, as very responsible duties. And indeed, I've never [heard] any of my colleagues [saying] ‘so there, we’re judges here.’ Like those shows ‘I'm a judge, I decided, I banged the gavel.’ This gives the impression that the judge is more privileged than some of those who hold the office.⁶⁶

Judge Gill revisited this vision of an ideal judge at the very end of the focus group. This imagining is in response to judicial authority as envisioned by her colleagues in this discussion. The judge shapes it through the experiences of crisis of authority, and problematises judicial role in the interplay of fiction and reality. Here reality judging is in tension with real judging through the evocation of a sense of fear by dramatic gavel banging. This intertwining calls into attention the relationship with the audiences. Also, Judge Gill articulates ‘a person uh a judge’ as she unpacks human responsibility through the pain coming from the body of the judge. This embodied judicial authority with duties and senses is problematised through the privilege assigned to the role. Judge Gill articulates awareness of the duty to own the decision instead of distancing oneself from the responsibility that this power position necessarily entails.

In this section, I have intertwined insights from theatre theories and practices of theatrical jurisprudence. This enabled my active participation in the unpacking of judicial role through the experiences of crisis in a context complicated by a corruption scandal. The final section is concerned with the emerging reimaginations of judicial role.

2.4 Reimagined authorities

In the analysis, I demonstrated various displacements that opened a space for negotiation of the relationship between judges and audiences in the condition of crisis. The interplay of politics and aesthetics in Judge Ride’s imagined authority reveals how the relationship with the audience is shaped through the experiences of fear. The powerless authority emerges from Judge Ride’s metaphor of a bolt in a big system. It is contrasted with the lost power in conditions of corruption and concerned with a lost trust in courts. However, the media is not blamed here. In contrast, it is the aesthetic representation of a fictional judge in Court that is strongly unacceptable to Judge Ride. Instead, the radiance of intellect is seen as an important quality in the aesthetic representation of judicial authority.⁶⁷ In making sense of Court’s social function, Judge Ride responds to the use of legal symbols as providing credibility for the unprofessional legal evaluation on Court:

I would have felt cheated. When you see an unprofessional person with a serious face doing nonsense.… A judge bangs a gavel and says, Granny, there is a sad ending for you according to this clause [laughing]. Perhaps it is joyful. I do not have to go to court, I see how the granny got scared for those chickens or was ordered to put a high fence … [Court] is the worst that could have been done. Even worse for me is when Bicycle News ⁶⁸ sometimes portrays judges. I don’t really like it. But masters created it, so it is fine.⁶⁹

Judge Ride’s articulation that a feeling of cheating is evoked by watching Court, and his laughter, indicate his responsiveness to the ‘affective realm of reality television that is its central structuring device’.⁷⁰ In making sense of Court’s genre, Judge Ride focuses on a genre’s function to produce ‘presence effects—effects that prime our bodies, essentially predisposing us to experience an event and its attendant symbols in a particular way’.⁷¹ Judge Ride makes sense of the audience’s enjoyment from seeing fear and order. This expectation of joy is partly in line with Stefan Machura’s argument about people’s desire for ‘orientation of what is and is not acceptable’.⁷² In this sense, real court becomes unnecessary if media provides that pleasure. This way, by using the perceived appeal of Court to the emotion of fear, Judge Ride resists it as a competitor to the authentic feeling of iconic logos.

In their stories, both Judge Ride and Judge Gill used Court’s representation of a gavel in their imaginings of the judicial role. Court is based on the US courtroom drama Judge Judy’s claims to reality through the employment of excess emotions and symbols,⁷³ and export of legal meanings.⁷⁴ American trial movies employ the gavel as an indication of judicial authority. It is common for fictional judges to use the gavel to control the trial, and to achieve the dramatic effect necessary to create engagement of a viewer.⁷⁵ To keep control over procedure, the absence of a judge could be substituted by the sound of a gavel,⁷⁶ but also the silence of a gavel has the same effect if the control is embodied.⁷⁷ Soundscape jurisprudence shows how the dynamic between control and a gavel, or rather the gavel’s silence, indicates the authority held by a judge over the juridical soundscape:

Within the parameters of the material limits set by architecture and technology, the gavel invests control over the juridical soundscape exclusively in the office of the judge. Moreover, the fact that this control has been so successfully internalised by the legal institution, that in practice judges rarely need to use their gavel at all, does not render it any less potent—in fact, quite the opposite. The gavel’s silence only serves to make the judge’s authority over the soundscape all the more complete.⁷⁸

In contrast to Judge Ride, Judge Gill resisted the authority conveyed through the use of the gavel, thereby disrupting the unambiguity of the power of fear. Instead, she problematised the illusion of privilege of the profession. This resistance indicates a shift in the paradigm of judging that is firmly entwined with the changing relationship with audiences. Yet the loss of privilege is an ambiguous concept that requires further research.

3 Conclusion

This article showed how participants engage with popular culture and how experiences of crisis are shaped through popular culture. This theatrical encounter created conditions for participants’ responses through their bodies, chipping the myth of objectivity, rationality, and universality. Moreover, these experiences prompted me as researcher to challenge corruption as unequivocally clear abstraction by animating it through historical circumstances and bodily responses. The experiences of judges grounded in the material condition of the encounter revealed the nuanced relations with law that develop at the intersection of the staging of judicial authority and the politics of corruption. This enables us to problematise the reforms of the judiciary as not just the way towards progress, but also as a deeply or even solely political endeavour that has implications not only for the judges but also for the public.

Judicial authority constituted in the conditions of the tension between law and culture revealed the process of creation of the iconic logo—we saw it in the stories of Judge Finley and Judge Ride. In the context of crisis politics, a technocratic controlling authority emerged through fear and shame, while Judge Gill’s resistance to this drama prompted awareness of the embodied responsibility as a fundamental part of judicial duties. Judicial responses revealed that the audience’s critique is heard, yet bare legal rules are insufficient to respond to the liveliness of the ethical challenges emerging through experiences of crisis. Theatrical practices provide a means to respond to the changing relationship between legal selves. This engagement with popular culture could be seen as training in more responsive legal practices, as demonstrated by the researcher herself.