Alive in the documents: capturing the craft of legality through paperwork
Professor Marie-Andree Jacob will give the next lecture in Keele University's programme of Inaugural Professorial Lectures 2015-16, on Tuesday, 15 March 2016, in the Westminster Theatre, Chancellor's Building, on the University campus. The title of her lecture is: "Alive in the documents: capturing the craft of legality through paperwork".
The lecture focuses on a seemingly mundane part of our legal lives: documents. Professor Jacob will speak about how documents are more than living things with their own trajectories and careers. They also participate intimately in the daily events of citizens and experts alike. Recognition of this fact has sparked the imagination of researchers within law and socio-legal studies, and understandably so. Using an ethnographic approach, and drawing on local and global examples from my fieldwork in the regulation of science and medicine, it will argue that many of the secrets and paradoxes of the ‘legal’ lie in the sphere of ‘law in the paperwork,’ at the boundary between ‘law in the books’ and ‘law in action.’ Professor Jacob will explain how the method of ethnography offers to help us better understand how both the ‘legal’ and the ‘illegal’ are crafted, creatively, through documents.
Marie-Andrée Jacob is a Professor of Law in the School of Law. Her current research interests span kinship and the law, medical law, research regulation and publication ethics. This year, with funding from the Leverhulme Trust, she begins a historical study of legal decision-making around research misconduct allegations.
Keele's programme of Inaugural Lectures are given by newly established professors within the University and aim to give an illuminating account of the speaker's own subject specialism. The lectures, which start at 6 pm in the Westminster Theatre, are chaired by the Vice-Chancellor, Professor Trevor McMillan.
This lecture is free and open to all.
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