ABSTRACT The protagonist of Kadare’s novel Broken April, set in the North Albanian Plateau, is required to kill his brother’s murderer according to the rules of the Kanun, a customary code of law according to which blood must be avenged, sometimes leading to generations of vendetta. In this context, the paper discusses the themes of hospitality and the blood feud in the novel, both of which play an

ABSTRACT The violence and related crimes committed during the genocide against the Tutsi, April-July 1994, led to the creation of the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda. This international machinery of justice was located in the neighbouring country of Tanzania. The often complex, draining, meandering, problem-prone legal proceedings, sprawling across 21 years generated a rich and diverse archive

ABSTRACT In this paper, I examine disputes about citizenship in Northern Ireland though the lens of poet Seamus Heaney’s 2004 version of Antigone, The Burial at Thebes. Citizenship and identity in Northern Ireland – if people are Irish or British – has been a central issue of the conflict there. The 1998 peace agreement promised to allow people to identify however they wished, and not be forced to

(2021). Law, Judges and Visual Culture. Law and Humanities. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT Courting Power, a courtroom-based art installation by Johannah Latchem presented in the Guildhall, Newcastle upon Tyne in 2018 explored how the acoustics and architecture of the unique courtroom at the Guildhall silenced or facilitated the voices of those involved in its judicial processes. Artistic and scientific approaches were employed in the investigation of the court’s abundant acoustic

ABSTRACT This article uses the criminological frameworks of ideal and complex victims to explore the Donmar Warehouse’s 2018 production of Measure for Measure that grounded the play in references to the Me Too movement. This production staged two versions of the play in one performance, including regendering and role-switching of the central antagonists, which drew attention to the gender dynamics

ABSTRACT It is the purpose of this article to examine the treatment of actors (and other ‘outlaws’) by the state in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, with the intention of exploring the general theme of ‘otherness’ and the particular role of the legal institution in regulating and reforming the image of the citizen or subject of law in post-Reformation, English society. I refer throughout

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the Irish language macaronic song ‘An Trucailín Donn’ (ATD) as a piece that is representative of the broader Irish/English macaronic tradition in exposing the identity conflicts that minority language speakers must internalize to resolve themselves as citizens. The article focuses, in particular, on how such songs expose the dilemma faced by Irish language speakers

(2021). Editorial. Law and Humanities: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 1-3.

ABSTRACT Indra Sinha's novel Animal's People provides a fictional account of the 1984 Union Carbide toxic gas leak in Bhopal, India. Animal, who is severely injured in the disaster, guides the reader through both the post-apocalyptic social landscape, as well as the community's failed efforts to hold the 'Kampani' accountable for the consequences of the leak. Reading Animal's story through the lens

(2021). The unconstructable earth: an ecology of separation. Law and Humanities: Vol. 15, No. 1, pp. 134-141.

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 of 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

(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