Regulation as Efficiency: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Regulation in Historic, Medieval, and Early Trendy Europe (Oxford College Press, April 2022)
Peters, a Columbia College comparative literature professor, traces the historical past of authorized efficiency and spectatorship via the early fashionable interval, investigating how efficiency actually created legislation: in civic arenas, courtrooms, judges’ chambers, marketplaces, scaffolds, and streets. Peters recovers an extended, wealthy, and largely ignored custom of jurisprudential considered legislation as a efficiency apply—a convention that, in working to tell apart legislation from theatrics, outlined the very nature of legislation.
