What is an arrest? A performance-as-research legal history workshop

Arrests are fundamental features of most legal systems. They are the basic mechanism by which a person is brought into the criminal (and sometimes civil) legal process. But we know relatively little about them. What makes an arrest different to an assault or a kidnapping? How do arrestees and arrestors understand arrests differently? Is an arrest an event or a process? When does it start, when is it over, and what happens if it fails?

This workshop addresses these questions in two innovative ways. First, it looks to the history of arrests for clues about their legal nature. Before the Victorian creation of uniformed professional police forces, people making arrests had to do everything they could to make it clear that they were acting as agents of law. They used particular words and brandished particular props to conjure legal authority, with varying levels of success.

Second, the workshop uses performance as a method of research. Arrests are essentially performative - certain words and actions change the legal situation of the people involved. This also makes them fragile and contestible. Participants in the workshop will help to develop scripts based on legal records of arrests in the 16th and 17th century, considering the questions that are raised by turning legal accounts into drama. These scripts will then be performed by student actors, allowing participants to discuss the particular problems and questions raised by trying to reconstruct legal process in this manner. At the end of the workshop, performers and participants will discuss what we learn from staging arrests that we can’t see on the page.

Programme

1.30-3:00 PM       Scripting arrests from legal records
3:00-3.30 PM       Coffee break
3.30-5:00 PM       Performing scripts and closing discussion

Organisers

Dr Jonah Miller (jm2106@cam.ac.uk) is a Research Fellow at King’s College, Cambridge, and a member of the Law and Humanities Hub at the Institute for Advanced Legal Studies. He writes about British legal and political history, with a particular focus on policing. His first book, Gender and Policing in Early Modern England, was shortlisted for the Royal Historical Society’s Whitfield Prize. His second book, about a police homicide in nineteenth-century London, is under contract with Penguin.

Dr Lucy J.S. Clarke (lucy.clarke@sheffield.ac.uk) is an interdisciplinary historian of early modern England whose work focuses on recovering common experiences and perceptions of the state and law, in part by using practice-as-research.  She has previously published on the performance of the state in early modern drama in performance. She is currently a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in History at the University of Sheffield, where she is working on a book exploring the quotidian ways the state was performed into reality in England between 1558 and 1641.

This event is free to attend, but booking is required.