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Making Motions: The Embodiment Of Law In Gestures, Bernard J. Hibbitts
Making Motions: The Embodiment Of Law In Gestures, Bernard J. Hibbitts
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In contemporary America, the locus of legal meaning is habitually deemed to be the written word. This article pushes our conception of law’s “text” beyond its traditional inscripted bounds by focusing on physical gesture as a legal instrumentality. The few studies of legal gesture undertaken to date have explained its prominence in various legal systems and cultural environments, the significance of specific legal gestures in specific historic contexts, and the depiction of legal gestures in particular manuscripts or other specific physical settings, but no one has considered the general functions of legal gesture as a modality.
In an effort to …