Abstract
The term accusation broadly refers to a ‘formal charge’ of wrongdoing brought against a person, the ‘act’ or imputing blame or guilt, or the ‘assertion’ that someone is guilty of a fault or offence.Yet, the accusatory process and its corporeal embodiment – the ‘accused’ – are inseparable from the political and legal orderings of a given time. Prior to the seventeenth century, for instance, sovereignty and law acted synonymously, where law represents the will of the sovereign. Foucault depicts the relation between law and sovereignty, ‘as a ritual of armed law, in which the prince showed himself, indissociably, both as head of justice and head of war’, and the criminal was the enemy against this sovereign.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 101-111 |
Number of pages | 12 |
Journal | Parallax |
Volume | 14 |
Issue number | 3 |
DOIs | |
Publication status | Published - 2008 |
Keywords
- DNA
- criminal law