(2021). The unconstructable earth: an ecology of separation. Law and Humanities. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Though law in/and/as performance is a burgeoning area of scholarship, with scholars exploring the relation between theatre, music and law, there is substantially less attention paid to the possibilities of dancing the law. In this article, the author identifies three styles of legal dance – (1) dance as legal practice, (2) dance as legal resolution, and (3) dance as legal research – providing

ABSTRACT This article centres on an unconventional figure. Tadeusz Cyprian (1898–1979) was not only an outstanding lawyer but also a talented photographer. He contributed to the documentation of nazi crimes during WW2. Cyprian was a prosecutor before the Supreme National Tribunal (Najwyższy Trybunał Narodowy), and one of the four Polish delegates at the Nuremberg Trials. My investigation concerns the

ABSTRACT This study examines the introductions to the earliest surviving English law codes: those Æthelberht (d. 616), Hlothere and Eadric (d. 685 & ?686) and Wihtred (d. 725) of Kent, and Ine (d. 726) and Alfred (d. 899) of Wessex. It argues that these texts address in thoughtful and imaginative ways significant questions of legal and royal authority, legislative legitimation, and the place of newly-written

(2020). Law and Humanities issue 14.2. Law and Humanities: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 131-134.

(2020). English legal histories. Law and Humanities: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 267-272.

ABSTRACT This paper engages in a cultural legal reading of the character Frank Castle (a.k.a ‘the Punisher’) as rendered in Netflix’s Daredevil (2015–2018) and The Punisher (2017–2019). Situated within the superhero genre, Castle is an extreme vigilante who instead of simply capturing criminals, kills them, presenting a critical interrogation of law and justice. The paper focuses on the explicit and

ABSTRACT This article seeks to break new ground by adopting an innovative methodology – a legal-narratological approach – in order to take a fresh look at the narrative dynamics and narrative tiers of a two-thousand-year-old piece of marriage legislation – the late first century BCE leges Iuliae. We argue that these Roman laws, which brought hitherto private behaviours into the public jurisdiction

ABSTRACT Rene Girard, influential theorist of sacrifice and victimage, casts Oedipus as a scapegoat, who absorbs the ‘free-floating’ guilt that has plagued Thebes. But is he? Girard’s definitions of the scapegoat and reciprocal violence are established, and then differentiated from the administration of punishment in the stateless societies of ancient Greek myths, using the laws of Zeus and the story

ABSTRACT The Justice Syndicate (TJS) is an interactive performance, featuring an audience who become jurors considering a difficult case. Via iPads, participants receive evidence, witness testimonies and prompts to vote and discuss the case. We compare TJS to other theatre performances in which audiences are juries, arguing it is unique in only having twelve audience members, with no additional spectators

ABSTRACT This article examines the legislative measures imposed by governments as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic and scrutinizes, in particular, governments’ extensive use of military metaphors to justify those measures. It argues that while the use of military metaphors can usefully and desirably function to mobilize widespread acceptance and compliance with the relevant legislative measures

(2020). Exhibition review: a reflection on Ruth Maxwell’s Not Consent exhibition as a method of challenging rape myths in Ireland. Law and Humanities: Vol. 14, No. 2, pp. 273-281.

ABSTRACT Robert Cover’s essay ‘Nomos and Narrative’ (1983) outlines a programme for an ambitious yet incomplete theory of law. While many interpreters focus on how it readdresses nomos, less attention is given to Cover’s notion of narrative. For Cover, narrative is not simply a complement to law that serves to pluralize it, but a key for a different conception of what law is, how it is constituted

ABSTRACT This essay proceeds in three parts. The first part introduces a Māori waiata (a ceremonial song, with movements) that occurred in the debating chamber of the New Zealand parliament in 2017 on the Third Reading of Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Bill. The resulting statute confers legal personality on the Whanganui River. The second part advances a way of approaching musical

ABSTRACT This essay examines the litigation of the Irish actor, Charles Macklin (1699?–1797), born in Culdaff. co. Donegal, setting his career as an actor and playwright within the context of legislation affecting his profession with particular reference to the period up to May 1775 and his successful prosecution, under Lord Mansfield’s ruling, against a riotous Covent Garden audience faction in 1773

ABSTRACT This paper provides both lawyers and cinema experts with some insights about the depiction of law and criminal justice in films in Japan. In recent years, there has been an increasing interest of the Japanese movie industry towards ‘courtrooms drama’, i.e., films set in tribunals and having lawyers, judges, and prosecutors as main characters: a small ‘Golden Age’ of law as depicted in Japanese

ABSTRACT One of the most iconic and concrete encounters one can have with international law is to visit its institutional buildings. This article aims to shed light on the ambivalent aspirations reflected by the architectural design of the International Criminal Court in The Hague and the European Union buildings in Brussels. It provides a sightseeing tour through the architectural landscape of these

ABSTRACT Struggles for justice are commonly articulated in literature and drama through metaphors of physical encumbrance (of being cramped, constrained, entangled and mired) and escape (to open landscapes and a view of the horizon and sky). What is less well known or observed is that this metaphorical opposition of encumbrance/escape plays an important role in legal language too. This article traces

ABSTRACT By taking a step back to revisit Robert Hale’s early twentieth-century critique of the concept of ‘coercion’ in contract, this paper attempts to gain a wider perspective on the freedom–coercion dichotomy – a dichotomy that is invoked to differentiate liberal and critical legal scholarship but also deployed in internal struggles within each ‘camp’. Juxtaposing ‘private autonomy’ with ‘regulation’

ABSTRACT Both Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben draw on the ancient Greek concept of nomos as an important element underpinning their legal theories. Aiming to restore that concept to its pre-sophistic meaning, they grant central weight to a piece of poetry in which Pindar famously proclaims that ‘law (nomos) is king of all’, guiding both mortals and immortals while ‘justifying the utmost violence with

ABSTRACT Each in its own manner, Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1965) – both first published in The New Yorker, both a cause célèbre, both retaining much of their original power a half century later – document crimes that appear to the author to strain the very concept of a motive. As if something as traditional as a motive might have impeded his work

ABSTRACT David Foster Wallace died before the publication of his novel The Pale King, which complicates and is, indeed, important to this novel. This article argues that law – as a broadly construed concept – is a character and subject of The Pale King. Many of the characters enact a form of legal subjection, by becoming agents of U.S. tax law, which construes them as agents of the law while providing

ABSTRACT The British writer J G Ballard is known for his distinctive treatments of the familiar and the everyday in organized society as vulnerable to rupture and descent into violence and chaos. Never straightforwardly dystopian, Ballard was capable of insightful analysis that revealed the strangeness of particular qualities of lived experience, challenging his audience to question their place in

ABSTRACT This paper explores inhuman/human constructions that feature in state responses to refugees. We move beyond straightforward normative claims that dehumanizing or demonizing refugees is unfair, unjust or bad to ask: what kind of inhuman monsters are refugees characterized as when they are ‘demonised’; and, what are the consequences of such a characterization? Our argument is that reading the

The articles in this issue comprise an impressively diverse range of contributions, engaging on the one hand with such contemporary concerns as the depiction of refugees and genocide and on the other with historical issues stretching back to Tudor England and even as far back as the Ancient Greeks. In addition to the articles, this issue contains the latest contribution to our occasional series of

ABSTRACT The facts surrounding Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon are well known. What is less well known is the effect which these events had on the lives of the Crown’s subjects. Little has been written on the topic given the fact that annulments of marriage within the prohibited degrees were rare. The authors have unearthed evidence concerning the various marriages of Edward Griffith

ABSTRACT This special section of Law and Humanities focuses on the 45th anniversary edition of James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination: a book that was ground-breaking when it first appeared in 1973 (since it is generally credited as having initiated the ‘law and literature’ movement) and that remains a hugely important resource today. White’s approach to legal scholarship and education - reading

ABSTRACT After the Second World War, representatives of the Allied powers developed an international legal definition of genocide. It precisely defines the necessary state of mind, genocidal acts and modes of agency or commission, determining which experiences are recognised and which harms are made visible. However, this abstract and clinical definition and its application do not convey the complexities

ABSTRACT This article examines the earliest literary evidence of ancient supplication practices in the archaic Greek Homeric epic tradition. It does so from a philological, linguistic, ritualist and theoretical perspective without however separating these elements as distinct and it aims to articulate a non-legalistic approach to the earliest evidence, as well as a hypothesis with regard to the sacredness

and legal context. Chapter seven reaches the end of Ulysses, where Bloom is isolated in his own home after failing to convince Stephen Dedalus to stay the night. The paucity of sufficient legal evidence of Molly’s adultery means that Bloom would only likely succeed in proving her socially unacceptable intimacy with Boylan (219). Hence the justification of Bloom’s ‘Divorce, not now’. Nevertheless, Bloom

ABSTRACT The discussion here explores the way in which forms of ‘popular’ justice have been used either preceding or instead of formal processes of accountability and legal control, with particular reference to changes in trading practices in the later nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries. At that time economic monopolisation and entrepreneurial innovation and wealth accumulation in industrialised

ABSTRACT The symposium for this issue comprises six responses to the video artwork Palais de Justice (2017) by artist Carey Young. The video presents a study of the life of Brussels’ vast, late-nineteenth-century court building. In Palais de Justice, Young presents ‘a legal system seemingly centered on, and perhaps controlled by women’. The respondents are Jeanne Gaakeer, Ruth Herz, Joan Kee, Linda

ABSTRACT From Paris’ capture of Helen in Homer’s Iliad, and the resulting 10-year war in retaliation, Western literature has a long tradition of narrativising the turn to war as a dispute in service of a woman. Yet in contemporary Western legal accounts it is assumed that legal arch-positivism now governs the decision to go to war, and so any such action can be considered rational and just. However

ABSTRACT Through specific, historical, interchanges and the more diffuse molding of our ‘Western’ social imaginary, the Judaic-Christian tradition has helped shape several of the criminal law’s culpability concepts, including guilt, blame and reconciliation. In doing so, it has contributed towards the inherent moral grammar of our criminal justice thinking. By considering perennial questions, such

ABSTRACT This article focuses on a group of young jazz enthusiasts who, under Nazi rule, formed a jazz band known as the Frankfurt Hot Club. Although the group had some connections with the Swing Youth movement, it regarded jazz as far more than a simple means of having fun. During the Second World War, those enthusiasts tuned in to foreign radio stations to listen to jazz, collected records, distributed

ABSTRACT True crime series have had a recent revival following the release of season 1 of the popular podcast Serial, and the Netflix documentary Making a Murderer. These series have been previously studied for how their popularity was derived from taking back legal narratives from institutional gatekeepers, from ‘jurifying’ the audience, and because of the ‘ecosystem’ of online fandom. But little

ABSTRACT This paper offers some ruminations on the place of rhetoric in modern legal education and some reflections on the undergraduate module The Art of Advocacy: Mooting and Forensic Rhetoric which the author devised and taught for the first time in 2016. The ‘art’ of advocacy is one which in practice works best when it is, or appears to be, most natural; just as the most convincing acting tends

ABSTRACT Starting from a reflection on Erving Goffman's notion of strategic interaction, this contribution discusses a number of paintings, all completed between 1433 and 1478, to argue that the haptic gaze in painting probably emerged between those dates. The emergence of the haptic gaze – i.e. the gaze that touches and senses, inquires, inspects and surmises – announces the gradual crystallization

ABSTRACT This article analyses the representation of a female lawyer whose personal tragedy encourages her to become a heroine lawyer for the socially disadvantaged. It explores a female filmmaker’s account of a woman lawyer fighting for a lost cause and examines in what way the public/private, law/justice and reason/emotion dichotomies are played out in her public performance and private life. Central

Davies incorporated the myth of Orpheus into his encomium to law: ‘[L]ike Orpheus harpe or Noahes Arke, it [law] charmeth the fierceness of the Lion & the Tiger, so as the poore lambe may ly in safety by them.’ Winston skilfully and successfully addresses the subject of the interface between law, lawyers and poetry during the Elizabethan period. In nine tautly written chapters, she provides a lucid

ABSTRACT Although Diderot never wrote an openly political treatise like those of his philosophe counterparts, his dramatic and fictional emphasis on bodily gesture serves to illuminate his legal conceptions, as I trace within the context of La Religieuse. Inspired by the historical case of Marguerite Delamarre, Diderot’s fictional Suzanne Simonin also endeavours to escape from the constrictions of

ABSTRACT In his novel Pudd’nhead Wilson, set in the later antebellum period but written after Reconstruction, Mark Twain dramatizes the contradictions of the American racial hierarchy. In the story a light-skinned young man, born a slave but switched in the cradle with a free child, meets a tragic fate when his identity is revealed. The novel forms an unintentional bridge between the ancient Roman

ABSTRACT In this article the concept of the tragic legal choice is established as an indispensable complement to our theoretical understanding of adjudication. Tragic legal cases are part of everyday adjudication (albeit of course not necessarily part of the everyday experience of each and every judge). In such cases, adjudication will engender a sense of tragic loss, incommensurability, messiness

ABSTRACT This article aims to demonstrate that works of art and literature can provide important insights in law and justice that are hard to grasp by one-sidedly rationalist methods of academic analysis. It takes Sophocles’ Antigone – perhaps the most classical text of law and literature’s familiar catalogue – as a case in point, drawing attention to some important aspects of that play’s legal epistemic

ABSTRACT This article considers the figure of the Monster through the sublime example of David Bowie. It will first provide a theoretical framework for understanding this legal category and social theory template for the outsider. In doing so, it will draw, in particular, on the work of Michel Foucault and Georges Canguilhem, work which understands the monster in terms of a double breach, of nature

It is a real privilege to have been asked by Gary Watt to step into Paul Raffield’s rather large shoes as his co-editor of Law and Humanities, and a pleasure to find myself in the position of reading and editing the diverse and often fascinating legal and humanities scholarship that the journal receives. The current issue may not be a ‘special’ one in the sense of a collection of articles purposely

ABSTRACT This essay considers some questions of crime, criminal justice and criminology in William Shakespeare’s play Measure for Measure (1604). In this early-modern English play, Shakespeare dramatized issues of criminology and criminal justice that Americans George Kelling and James Wilson theorized nearly four centuries later in their famous essay ‘Broken Windows’ (1982). While this observation

ABSTRACT In On Law and Economy in Society, Weber presents trial by ordeal as being the archetype of formal irrationality. Drawing on illustrations of ordeal from the ancient Near East to the present day, this article critiques Weber and argues that a more nuanced understanding of the operation of ordeal reveals flaws and inconsistencies in Weber’s understanding of the ordeal, and consequently his classification

ABSTRACT This article raises new questions about the meaning of juror participation in a criminal trial. Through an interdisciplinary exploration I not only theorize the position and potentiality of the jury, but I also reflect on the process of working with a theatre director to create work which is both academic research and public theatre performance in equal measure. I challenge the reader to reconsider

One of the many consequences of the unexpected political events of 2016 has been a renewed focus on communities on the margins of society and of the law. In the era of Brexit and Donald Trump, refugees, economic migrants, the white working class, sexual outcasts and racial minorities, to name but a few, have dominated the headlines as the world appears to be stumbling towards a new political dispensation

ABSTRACT Recent decisions have given legal identity to rivers such as Te Awa Tupua in New Zealand, and the Ganges and Yamuna in India, effectively treating them as having all the rights, duties and liabilities of a legal person. Looking at such cases, in which the enduring fiction of the legal person is extended over an increasingly wide range of referents, we are reminded that this fiction is anything

ABSTRACT The choral character of the academy, the bark of fashion and the other signs of the times register dimly a species of collective affect to research and writing. The offices of the academic include amity and its attendant aspirations of altruism, loyalty and selflessness but these intimate interiors of intellect are seldom if ever acknowledged, let alone analysed. Starting from the symptomatic

ABSTRACT This paper discusses legal sex in the context of transgender jurisprudence, reviewing arguments for individual agency, elective categories and ideas concerning or ‘self-sovereignty’. It is argued that legal sex has no explicit foundation in case law or statute, and that it was effectively brought into being by the decision in Corbett v Corbett (otherwise Ashley) [1971] P 83. In Corbett the

ABSTRACT Confession has for centuries been known as the queen of evidence. This paper examines an unusual type of confessions – ones that are made in public and out of court, the main target audience of which is not legal enforcement or court officers but the generic public. Operating in the margins of law, these confessions may make legal procedures redundant. Through analysing three recent public

ABSTRACT Precedential authority has an important place in doctrinal explication and analysis in Anglo-American law. Efforts to manage these precedents visually, in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, display a variety of solutions to the question of where precedents belong and how to represent them. Sir Edward Coke’s approach, in his Institutes (1628–44), was to place the citations in the margin;

ABSTRACT I explore the antinomy of where indecency belongs – in the centre or at the margins of discourse? – and reconsider the concept of obscenity based on a particular sense of the margin that has informed its function in literature and law. How can a public discourse address what is by definition to be kept at the margins? Is it possible to quote obscene speech without being guilty of the same

ABSTRACT Honoré de Balzac’s 1836 novella L'Interdiction is the story of a wife's attempt to have her husband declared legally incompetent by reason of insanity, and of an idealistic juge d'instruction's investigation of her request. In a procedurally detailed recounting of the investigation, Balzac reflects on the law's role alongside other discourses of authority in defining and adjudicating normal

In addition to three full-length articles, the second issue of our tenth-anniversary volume of Law and Humanities includes one of our occasional instalments on the subject of legal education. In this section are two short plays (Coke Habit and Little Venice), written by undergraduate students at the University of Warwick as part of their assessment in ‘Shakespeare and the Law’. Coke Habit and Little

The status of facts, objects and things has recently been subject to important theoretical analyses. This article picks up on such scholarship and turns to the Renaissance articulation of facts in accounting for the fabrication of social and civic life. It does so by examining the strong links forged between lawyers and those poets who might be described as apologists of poesy. What emerges is an account

There is an immediate irony in regard to witchcraft and its history. Few, in England at least, have believed in witches for at least two and a half centuries. Yet we remain fascinated, it might even be said enchanted, by the subject. It is of course the peculiarity which seeds the fascination. We live in a rationalist age. Sometimes history seems modern and contemporary. It is for this reason that