Curating a Museum of Legal Accidents
7 Pages Posted: 3 Oct 2017
Date Written: October 2, 2013
Abstract
This piece introduces the symposium issue ʻLaw and Its Accidentsʼ. The issue emerged from the Melbourne Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory, which took place at the Melbourne Law School on 15–16 December 2011. The theme of the symposium responded to two provocations: first, the anxieties to do with accidents of technology such as that surrounding the disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station in Japan in 2011; and second, Paul Virilio's writings on curating a 'museum of accidents', in which he urges us to make space in our museum of technological progress for an equally important museum of the accident. The essential theme of the symposium, which we asked all authors to contemplate, was: ʻIf law is a technology, then what are its accidents?ʼ We asked this question because we believe that in law the accident never just happens: it is embedded in the techniques, institutions and places of law.
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