Metagaming and fatiguing the judiciary through acting in bad faith

This chapter takes four theatrical stock characters as point of departure, in two subsets: the killjoy and fool, and the cheater and spoilsport. It compares theatrical courtroom provocations by leftist activists and militants in the 1960s and 1970s with recent “bad faith” actions in court by the American right-wing activist Alex Jones and President Donald Trump. The chapter argues that law’s theatrical way of showing a general audience how the judiciary aims to serve justice is disturbed but not threatened by defendants acting the killjoy, the fool, or the cheater. Acting the fool, for instance, provokes a confrontation between two different kinds of theatre but with the agonistic logic of court cases still in place, with judges embodying power and the accused acting as their carnivalesque challengers. When defendants act in bad faith, however, there is a double confrontation, inside and outside the court. Those acting in bad faith are what Johan Huizinga defines as spoilsports who pretend to play the game while aiming to destroy it. Currently, the spoilsport manifests itself in and outside of court by using contemporary media. In this context, the theatrical nature of the judiciary needs protection in order to do justice to victims and in order to be able to truly and forcefully act against those who aim to destroy justice.