This may be the author’s version of a work that was submitted/accepted for publication in the following source: Sykes, Robbie & Tranter, Kieran (2015) ’You gotta roll/rule with it’: Oasis and the concept of law. Griffith Law Review, 24(4), pp. 571-591. This file was downloaded from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/124803/ c Consult author(s) regarding copyright matters This work is covered by copyright. Unless the document is being made available under a Creative Commons Licence, you must assume that re-use is limited to personal use and that permission from the copyright owner must be obtained for all other uses. If the docu- ment is available under a Creative Commons License (or other specified license) then refer to the Licence for details of permitted re-use. It is a condition of access that users recog- nise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. If you believe that this work infringes copyright please provide details by email to [email protected] Notice: Please note that this document may not be the Version of Record (i.e. published version) of the work. Author manuscript versions (as Sub- mitted for peer review or as Accepted for publication after peer review) can be identified by an absence of publisher branding and/or typeset appear- ance. If there is any doubt, please refer to the published source. https://doi.org/10.1080/10383441.2015.1138922 This is a preprint of: Robbie Skyes and Kieran Tranter ‘You Gotta Roll/Rule with It’: Oasis and The Concept of Law’ (2015) 24(4) Griffith Law Review 571-591 DOI: 10.1080/10383441.2015.1138922. It is available to download at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/10383441.2015.1138922 ‘You Gotta Roll/Rule with It’1: Oasis and The Concept of Law Robbie Sykes and Kieran Tranter∗ This article analyses H.L.A. Hart’s legal positivist theory through the life and music of the English band Oasis. It is argued that bringing Hart and Oasis into co-orbit reveals a fundamental ambiguity and anxiety within Hart’s jurisprudential performance. It is argued that Oasis’ self-confidence compares to Hart’s certainty of a distinction between law and morality and Oasis’ populism echoes Hart’s claim of law as dependent on communal assent. However, an examination of Oasis also makes visible an essential critique of the certain and voluntary nature of Hart’s system. Oasis’ performances, on and offstage, highlight the undisclosed essentiality of violence within The Concept of Law that betrays ambiguity and anxiety regarding core elements of Hart’s jurisprudential performance; the role of officials and the clarity of rules. Introduction This article analyses H.L.A. Hart’s legal positivist theory through the life and music of rock stars Liam and Noel Gallagher, singer and guitarist, respectively, of the now-defunct English band Oasis. Notwithstanding the palpable differences in time, audience, genre and methods between Hart’s jurisprudential project of steering legal positivism between the superficiality of 1 Oasis (1995) ‘Roll With It’ (What’s the Story) Morning Glory? ∗ Dr. Robbie Sykes, BIntBus, LLB (Hons), PhD (Griffith), DipGrad (Otago), affiliate member, Socio-Legal Research Centre, Griffith University. Dr. Kieran Tranter, BSc LLB (Hons), PhD (Griffith). We would like to thank Professor William MacNeil and Professor Andy Bennett for their comments and direction, as well as the two peer reviewers and the editors of the Griffith Law Review for their comments on this article. All errors and omissions are our own. 1 the command theory and the sophistry of natural law2 and Oasis’ loud affirmation of British pop-rock music, both projects share at their core an overconfidence and overstatement that masked uncertainty. Hart’s accessible prose and rational delineations and the Gallagher brothers’ driving riffs and vocals might seem to be from different worlds. Except there are core commonalities; both can be seen as attempts to delineate an order of things (for Oasis the difference between authentic and rubbish music; for Hart the distinction between law and morality) and incorporation of community and tradition into their performances (for Oasis self- awareness of being a rock ‘n’ roll band; for Hart the grounding of the posited legal order on communal assent). However, bringing Oasis and Hart into co-orbit reveals an essential critique of the certain and voluntary nature of Hart’s system. Oasis’ performances, on and offstage, highlight the essentiality of violence within Hart’s jurisprudential performance that reveals fundamental ambiguities and anxieties with the role of officials and clarity of rules. For the theory of law, this article shows that the ‘stars’ within its jurisprudential pantheon are engaged in ‘performance’ and that as performance – conceived as such and dramatised through comparison with the performance of rock stars – fundamental insights and nuances are revealed. This argument occurs in three ‘sets’. Set One deals with the novelty of the approach of the article by locating it within an emerging sub-theme in cultural legal studies of rock music and jurisprudence. The benefit of bringing rock music into co-orbit with jurisprudence as a way of exposing, revealing and highlighting tensions, anxieties, and assumptions within legal theorising will be explained. Set Two brings Hart and Oasis into co-orbit. It is argued that the Gallaghers’ confidence in the superiority of their band, asserted in contrast to other musicians, 2 Hart’s use of epic navigation metaphors - Scylla and Charybdis - to demark how he tries to find the safe middle ground between formalism and realism is well known: Hart (1994), p 147. See Flores (2011). 2 was comparable to Hart’s (apparently) certain distinction between law and morality. Further, it is argued that Oasis’ populism is echoed within Hart’s description of law as being dependent on communal assent. In making these arguments this part establishes the commonality between Hart’s jurisprudential performance and Oasis’ performances, both musical and offstage. Set Three draws upon these commonalities to show that Oasis’ performance make visible the essential place of violence within Hart’s The Concept of Law.3 This set climaxes by showing that this violence, amplified through engagement with Oasis, reveals that the surface confidence of The Concept of Law is beset with ambiguities and anxieties concerning officials and rules. Set One: Rock Music and Jurisprudence – Oasis and Hart The flowering of cultural legal studies in recent years has brought a diverse array of popular cultural texts into law. Cultural legal studies that draw upon film,4 television,5 and comic books6 have become increasingly common. As part of this diversification, cultural legal scholars have also begun to explore music. In order to provide another vantage from which law can be explained and evaluated, music’s structures and practices, its ways of creating and performing, as well as the feelings it evokes, have been utilised as legal scholarly resources. One approach, taken by Desmond Manderson7 and Michael Richmond,8 has been to identify and reflect upon connections between the aesthetic impact of the legal and the musical. Mainly, however, it has been the functions performed by those directly involved in law that have been considered by musically-minded academics. Issues to do with the way that law is brought to 3 Hart (1961); Hart (1994). 4 MacNeil (2007); Young (2010). 5 Tranter (2007); Robson and Silbey (eds) (2012). 6 Bainbridge (2012); Lloyd (2012); Giddens (ed) (2015). 7 Manderson (2000). 8 Richmond (1998). 3 life (and affects people’s lives) through interpretive (in the work of Adam Gearey,9 as well as Jack Balkin and Stanford Levinson10) and improvisational acts (in the work of Carol Weisbrod11 and Sara Ramshaw12), and in a context of discourses of authenticity (David Caudill13, Ramshaw14) have been examined. The unique features of musical genres as diverse as classical,15 folk,16 country,17 and jazz18 have been enlisted in this endeavour and applied to different facets of the legal world. While some law and music scholarship has drawn upon popular forms,19 rock music remains largely unexplored. This article expands this earlier law and music research in two directions. First, by taking as its focus a mainstream and popular rock music group; and second, by using music to analyse jurisprudence rather than the specific responsibilities of legal actors. William MacNeil has argued that popular culture is a setting in which community perspectives on legal matters are expressed in coded form, and that these views can be used to supplement and even recast legal academic preoccupations.20 Drawing from MacNeil’s insight, this article contends that rock music, as popular cultural practice, can strikingly illustrate and appraise jurisprudence. This article departs from MacNeil’s work by examining not only the jurisprudential significance of a particular text, but by also examining the significance of the text’s author. 9 Gearey (1999). 10 Balkin and Levinson (1999). 11 Weisbrod (1999). 12 Ramshaw (2006). 13 Caudill (1999). 14 Ramshaw (2004), Ramshaw (2010). 15 Manderson (1999). 16 Weisbrod (1999). 17 Caudill (1999). 18 Ramshaw (2006). 19 Jaff (1986), Richmond (1998), Gearey (1999). 20 MacNeil (2007), p 1. 4 Rock music differs from literature in that it is multimodal and that, in particular, its creator – the rock star – is frequently embodied in the practice of popular music. Be it through their voice, their image on stage and in the ubiquitous music videos, or the persona conveyed through interviews, the rock star feeds into a broader coupling of texts of which the music is just one track mixed with other tracks to form a commodity for sale on the mass and popular market. In his semiotic and sociological examination of Madonna, Georges-Claude Guilbert identifies multiple facets that are socially significant and can be loci for meaning and analysis: ‘I consider the whole of Madonna’s work and the whole of her person as a sum of signs lending themselves to analysis.