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10 L. & Critique 1 (1999)

handle is hein.journals/lwcrtq10 and id is 1 raw text is: DAVID EVANS THEATRE OF DEFERRAL: THE IMAGE OF THE LAW AND THE ARCHITECTURE OF THE INNS OF COURT ABSTRACT. This article addresses the architecture of the Inns of Court, the home of the Common Law. The approach taken, however, rejects an approach that would reduce the Inns to a roster of historical details and laudatory description. Instead, the Inns are seen, if not actually felt, as the embodiment of the original ground of law. This experience is re- vealed through a three-stage discovery process that (1) situates the Inns within the medieval context of symbol and ritual as informed by Turner's concept of liminality; (2) analyzes the space of the Inns using concepts of bodily disunity derived from the psychoanalysis of Lacan and Klein; (3) relates this space to the body of Law in phenomenological terms, as a function of the irresolvable priority of either arche or anarche. The article concludes with a series of speculative propositions on a series of originary architectonic sites: the labyrinth (Daedolos and origin of the city), the pinnacle (the figure of justice or the body of the blind woman), and the door (Kafka's Before the Law). These culminate in the assertion that the architecture of the Inns of Court stages the deferral of bodily interiority through which the Law simultaneously derives its infinite remove and its authority. KEY WORDS: architecture, freedom, law, liminality, phenomenology, ritual, symbol, Inns of Court The law ... is a theatre of self-knowledge (Donald Philip Verene, The New Art of Auto- biography)1 ... a space composed uniquely of openings ... (Denis Holier, Against Architecture)2 The four Inns of Court - Lincoln's Inn, Inner Temple, Middle Temple, and Gray's Inn which comprise the home of the Common Law, are located between the Cities of Westminster and the City of London. The Inns of Court are voluntary associations of barristers, who enjoy exclusive right 1 D.P. Verene, The New Art of Autobiography: An Essay on the Life of Giambittista Vico Written by Himself (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 139. 2 D. Holier, Against Architecture: The Writings of George Bataille (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 61. rA Law and Critique 10: 1-25, 1999. O © 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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