Songs and Static: Legalities of White Noise

This paper was delivered as a keynote talk at the 13th Annual Doctoral Forum on Legal Theory, 'Sirens + Silences: Law in Lockdown', co-hosted by Melbourne Law School and UNSW Law. Responding to the convenors' invitation to reflect on "a year marked by upheaval and stasis", it explores how legal scholars in various settings might plan a route out of the global COVID-19 pandemic that is not simply a return home. Five legal and political "songs" in broad circulation are identified – songs of salvation, separation, suspension, stagnation, and absurdity – and arguments made for resisting some of their appeals. Instead, the paper suggests, legal scholars might do well to look to the commonplace normativity of survival: the ceaseless static of making do and getting by. By planning and organizing around some of the ways that people have lived the pandemic, legal scholars might perhaps become attuned to possible ways of living lawfully without casting sectors of the population into surplus.