Abstract
“Performance” and “performativity” have become central terms in the discussion of legal identity over the past decade or two, and “performance” and “theatricality” figure in a number of theoretical writings on law. This essay reviews these discussions, looking at the ways in which they construe legal performance and assessing what they have to say about its nature, meaning, and consequences for the law. Diagnosing a split in the critical literature between a vision of legal theatricality endemically complicit with the law's authoritarian control of the subject and a vision of it as an agent of liberation from authoritarian subjugation, I identity this split with a longer history of ambivalence about the theatricality of the law. On the one hand, this essay is simply a map of what has been said in the past few decades about legal performance. On the other, it serves as a critical introduction to a longer-term study of the role of legal performance (as both instrument and concept) in the historical production and reception of the law.
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