However, after an unprecedented, extremely controversial, and highly mediated judicial corruption scandal in 2019, Footnote 12 the rates of public trust plummeted, uncovering complex dynamics between the image of courts, mass media, and the public. Highest in more than two decades, public trust in the judiciary in 2018 indicated a remarkable achievement for Lithuania, Footnote 11 a country whose judicial system had been in a state of flux since the end of the Soviet era. Footnote 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.
Footnote 8 Drawing on theatrical jurisprudence, I understand body as memory Footnote 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’. Footnote 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. Footnote 3 Narrative jurisprudence argues for stories of the other Footnote 4 as a ‘way of education and caution’ for legal self, Footnote 5 yet as law is increasingly staging itself, Footnote 6 the performance turn in law demands theatrical presence that is material and embodied. The main concern of legal storytelling is the humanising role of the stories, Footnote 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'. This article seeks to contribute to the debates on humanising practices in law, in particular on the role of ‘intermedial experiences’ Footnote 1 in the context of crisis. The article concludes by contemplating how this authority shapes our lifeworlds. 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. Emerging from a crisis of authority is the changing face of judging. It shows how judicial authority is constituted in the conditions of crisis on the tension between law and culture. 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. 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. 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. The article relies on fieldwork data collected in the interviews conducted by the author with Lithuanian judges in 2019. The article draws on cultural legal studies to explore the constitution of judicial authority in the context of a democracy in flux.
This way, law needs to make sense of any crisis to respond to it.
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 article is concerned with law’s experiences and making sense of crisis.