Julie Stone Peters's Law as Performance invites readers to step away from the decrees, doctrines, and debates that dominate the Western legal tradition and turn instead to how the law was experienced by ordinary people who not only observed it in action but also found ways to challenge and subvert it. In so doing, she leaves aside historiographical and theoretical debates focused on the intention, agency, or speech acts of sovereigns and, with it, the origins and location of sovereignty, to offer a compelling, and often entertaining, collection of comparisons, case studies, and insights that center law's subjectivity and mutability, not as a matter of juridical interpretation or application, but through its performance and theatricality.

This is no easy task, given that the records, opinions, and interpretations accompanying legal disputes, contests, and trials are rife with details about the facts and persons involved but say comparatively little of the movements and gestures of participants or the behavior of those who witnessed them. Peters offers an eclectic discussion of a broad range of actions, expressions, images, and rhetoric, in public and semi-public spaces that were used by those performing the law before judges and juries. She also considers how those who participated in or witnessed such performances helped shape the meaning and significance of law, legal proceedings, and even legal authority. Instead of using literary evidence to draw out elements of what Peters calls, following Peter Goodrich, minor jurisprudence, she explores the ways that lawyers are trained, including rhetorical methods of jurists like Cicero and Quintilian, techniques developed by actors to move and entertain audiences, and in academic exercises such as moot courts and disputations. Through all this is the persistent refrain, which Peters traces from Aristotle through the early modern period, that law is not theater but something far more austere and normative. It is immune to the capricious whims of both those who create, interpret, or enforce it, and those who are subject to it.

Peters frames her exploration of the tensions between the performance of law by experts (statecraft) and law as theater (stagecraft) with an account of a 1571 spectacle at Tothill Fields. The exhibition played out before an audience of four thousand, and was not solely meant to entertain; it was also meant to teach those in attendance a lesson: law resided in court, under the guardianship of experts, not in an open field (no matter how closely it resembled the Court of Common Pleas). For Peters, this is clear evidence that the force and power of law derive from (and depend on) its public performance. In chapters 1 and 2, the focus moves from the fields of Westminster to the agoras and forums of ancient Greece and Rome to explore the perils and promise of using rhetoric, gesture, and acting by advocates to manipulate the emotions of their audiences, spectators, and judges. Building on her arguments about the art of persuasion and the performativity of law, chapter 3 explores medieval theorists’ discussions of forensic oratory and delivery.

Chapter 4 focuses on legal performance and the rejection of it in action. Peters juxtaposes the disorderly and defiant actions of crowds and individuals against the expectations of legal authorities. Her discussion of how audiences of Jan Hus's heresy trial (1415) and the Innsbruck witch trial (1485) recast aspects of law through their participation is especially compelling. Chapters 5 and 6 draw the reader back to the more orderly world of legal training and education. Chapter 5 explores a Europe-wide shift in legal cultures that paired the necessity of advocates to develop expertise in law with a mastery of rhetoric, tone, intonation, and gestures in court. Chapter 6 moves away from handbooks and treatises to exercises, like disputations and moot courts, at universities and the Inns of Court designed to make law students into lawyers. Finally, in the epilogue she reminds us that, as strange as the spectacle of Tothill might seem to American audiences, their propensity to put the law itself on trial in a variety of venues—including movies, documentaries, and live broadcasts—stands as evidence that we still live in a world in which the power of law depends on the buy-in of spectators and the performativity of legal actors.