Events

We regret to inform you that the talk has been cancelled due to unforeseen circumstances. We apologise for any inconvenience caused.

Jointly organized by the Centre for Legal Theory, and Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore.

CHAIRPERSON

Dr Sabarish Suresh, Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore

ABSTRACT

The scene of interrogation has for some time been the subject-matter of intense scrutiny and debate in criminal law and reform. This has extended from concerns about hostage justice to miscarriages of justice more generally. It has also been a mainstay of cinematic depictions of the relationship between law and policing, prosecution and evidence. Iconic scenes from the cinema of Kurosawa (Stray Dog) and Kore-eda (The Third Murder and Shoplifters) have represented the intimacy of the unrecorded interview as the conduit for truth. At the same time, Japanese legal and policy reforms have introduced the apparatus of audio-visual recording of police and prosecutorial interviews during custody, What is the status of evidence, in the reformed court procedure and the narratives of cinema concerned with the scene of interrogation? Answering this question will require attention to relations between the discourses of law and cinema, judges and saiban-in (lay judges),and confessions and circumstantial evidence.

ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

Alison Young is the Francine V. McNiff Professor of Criminology in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne. She is also the Deputy Director of the Melbourne Centre for Cities, a cross-faculty multi-disciplinary research group engaged in researching cities in Australia and globally. A prominent figure in the development of new paradigms of criminological and legal thinking, particularly around culture, space, affect, and the senses, her ongoing research engages with the ways in which we live in and govern city spaces. She is currently researching the relationship between the built environment and urban governance in Australia and Japan, in respect of issues such as graffiti and urban creativity, politics and protest, homelessness, and the night-time economy. She has been a Visiting professor at Amherst College in Massachusetts, a visiting research fellow at the Humanities Research Centre at the Australian National University and a visiting professor at the Manheim Centre for Criminology at the London School of Economics in 2018. She is conducting one ARC-funded study of spatial justice in the context of public homelessness and public dissent, and another on night work in contemporary Australian cities. Together with Peter D. Rush, she is co-writing a book on urban atmospheres of law and criminal justice in Japan.

Peter D. Rush is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Law at the University of Melbourne. He researches and publishes in criminal law (common law, comparative, international), jurisprudence and the humanities. As well as a scholar in England and Australia, he has been a youth worker, an artist, filmmaker. He is the author of several books on criminal law and edited collections on jurisprudence and critical legal theory. He was the Karl Loewenstein Fellow in Jurisprudence and Political Thought at Amherst College, USA. He has made a short documentary film concerning justice, aesthetics and colonialism in the city of Melbourne, and is an associate of the Melbourne Centre for Cities. His current research concerns the legal rhetoric of audio-visual recording of custodial interrogations in Australia and Japan, as well as the formation of legal precincts in cities in Australia and elsewhere. He has a longstanding interest in Japanese criminal law. Together with Alison Young, he is co-writing a book about urban atmospheres of law and criminal justice in Japanese cities.

REGISTRATION

This in-person talk is open to the NUS community (staff and students) and invited guests.
For further enquiries, please write to clt@nus.edu.sg.