Unitarians playing games with jurisdiction

A principal element of law is the unpredictable outcome of its proceedings. In recent years political actors have become highly capable of exploiting the element of chance in law, aiming not so much to prove guilt or maintain innocence, but rather to use an essential aspect of jurisdiction, namely that it is an agon : a battle, as both Johan Huizinga and Cornelia Vismann contended. The affordances offered by this characteristic can be seen in terms of a plurality that is the result of culturally and medially determined forms of legality , as Greta Olson calls it. This plurality has a counterpart, however, in an equally culturally inspired and mediatized form of totalitarianism. In analyzing the populist play with law, our guide is Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens , in which he considers law’s origin in wager, match, and chance. The first is worked out with regard to cases involving Silvio Berlusconi, the second with the (thousands of) cases in which Donald Trump or his businesses were involved, and the third with cases in which the family Bolsonaro was involved, with its current head Jair Bolsonaro as former Brazilian president. Their legal and lusory tactics make it urgent to reconsider the relation between the fields of law and the humanities. If jurisdiction is being played with, we had better be able to grasp the multiple modalities of play.