Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-09-21DOI: 10.1080/1535685X.2020.1805913
Alice Caputo
{"title":"BOOK REVIEW: Flora Di Donato The Analysis of Legal Cases, A Narrative Approach (Routledge: New York, 2019) pp. 302.","authors":"Alice Caputo","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2020.1805913","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1805913","url":null,"abstract":"It is now clear that judicial decisions and the reality that gravitates around the justice system are a source of constant and fruitful inspiration for many highly successful stories, novels, films...","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"55 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"129253637","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-09-04DOI: 10.1080/1535685x.2020.1805915
Sophie Doherty
{"title":"BOOK REVIEW: Desmond Manderson, Danse Macabre: Temporalities of Law in the Visual Arts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2019), pp. 281","authors":"Sophie Doherty","doi":"10.1080/1535685x.2020.1805915","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685x.2020.1805915","url":null,"abstract":"There has been a reignition of interest in the use of visual art in legal scholarship. 1 Likewise, there has been a reassessment of the intersections between law and time, that seeks to consider th...","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"47 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"134122810","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1535685x.2019.1635355
Alyse Bertenthal
{"title":"Standing Up for Trees: Rethinking Representation in a Multispecies Context","authors":"Alyse Bertenthal","doi":"10.1080/1535685x.2019.1635355","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685x.2019.1635355","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract For decades expectation of legal rights for nonhuman nature has been central to discussions of climate loss and change. Conceptual debates over whether trees and other nature have standing have been useful for conservationists and reformists hoping to use law to end the destruction of nonhuman nature. Yet assigning rights to nature requires us to grapple with new relational and legal frameworks; to rework the ways in which nature is represented as the subject of legal disputes and as a legal subject. This article explores what it means to stand up for nonhuman nature – specifically, trees – in law. That inquiry moves beyond the decades-old question of whether trees and other nature should have legal rights. Instead, I ask how trees can claim and express those rights in what remains the anthropocentric space of law. I suggest that literature offers a way out of this conundrum, helping us to rethink representation by formulating a “good story” that moves beyond self and species to inspire acceptance of a broader – albeit sometimes unrecognizable – community.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125323029","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1535685x.2019.1635359
C. Turner
{"title":"The Comedic Governance of Indigenous Land Rights in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia and Marie Clements’ Burning Vision","authors":"C. Turner","doi":"10.1080/1535685x.2019.1635359","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685x.2019.1635359","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This article examines the use of literary genre in Supreme Court of Canada (SCC) decisions on Indigenous land rights (Aboriginal title) and in Métis playwright Marie Clements’ 2003 play Burning Vision. I argue that legal decisions on Indigenous rights in Canada take on the features of specific literary genres, and that the genre of these decisions changes over time in response to broader sociopolitical shifts. In response to Section 35(1) of the 1982 Constitution Act, Aboriginal title decisions took on the structural features of comedy, a genre in which reconciliation is facilitated by the disclosure of previously hidden family relationships. This can be seen in Delgamuukw v. British Columbia (1997), a decision wherein the SCC reconciles the uneasy coexistence of two legal systems (Indigenous and common law) within the same national space by making these systems members of the same legal family. Clements’ play critiques this form of genealogical reconciliation by demonstrating how Indigenous law is forced to join the “family” of settler-colonial common law, and by exposing the violence that is elided through such processes of genealogical reconciliation. This article contributes to critical conversations about the relationship between law and genre and about the legal recognition of Indigenous rights.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128884756","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1535685x.2019.1636542
E. McNulty
{"title":"Original Intent: The Limits of Legal Imagination in Colm Tóibín’s The Heather Blazing","authors":"E. McNulty","doi":"10.1080/1535685x.2019.1636542","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685x.2019.1636542","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract By charting the decision-making processes of its protagonist, Irish High Court Judge Eamon Redmond, Colm Tóibín’s novel The Heather Blazing traces the contours of a conservative legal imagination as it engages with an Ireland on the cusp of significant societal change. Taking the novel’s primary intertext, the Irish Constitution of 1937, as its critical key, this article traces the jurisprudential tensions revealed by Redmond’s modalities of judgment. In the process, what is revealed are the complex dialogues – between the competing claims of natural law, legalism, originalism, and the doctrine of unenumerated rights – that are at play in the progress of Irish Constitutional law, and its reception in the popular imagination, at the end of the twentieth century.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"14 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117127529","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-09-01DOI: 10.1080/1535685x.2019.1675288
Carolyn Ownbey
{"title":"Jerusalem, 1961: Muriel Spark’s Cold War Intrigue","authors":"Carolyn Ownbey","doi":"10.1080/1535685x.2019.1675288","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685x.2019.1675288","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Muriel Spark investigates the meanings of community, nationality, duty, and betrayal across her oeuvre. In her novel The Mandelbaum Gate (1965), Spark experiments with a different kind of citizenship and community belonging than the Cold War climate typically allows, and she does so in content as well as through the style of her prose. In the context of the Cold War, national belonging and citizenship are politically charged endowments: conflicting memberships can only belong to double agents. Because protagonist Barbara—a British, half-Jewish, Catholic convert, like her author—does not swear fealty exclusively to Britain, Judaism, Israel, or Catholicism, she is seen as betraying each in turn. Challenging notions of singular nationality or uncomplicated allegiance in light of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), Spark employs melodrama to parse the meanings of betrayal and belonging. The excesses of melodrama serve as a model for citizenship in the postwar, decolonizing world.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"5 6 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"117008975","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-08-21DOI: 10.1080/1535685X.2020.1804223
D. Kenny
{"title":"The Human Pared Away: Hilary Mantel’s Thomas Cromwell as an Archetype of Legal Pragmatism","authors":"D. Kenny","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2020.1804223","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1804223","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall trilogy are iconic pieces of literature, but also represent a hugely insightful commentary on the law. Her protagonist, Thomas Cromwell, is the archetype of a philosophical legal pragmatist: willing to use the law and its language to achieve his ends, but regarding adherence to any principled or abstract account of the law as misleading and even dangerous. With striking parallels to the pragmatist philosophy of William James, Richard Rorty, Richard Posner and others, Mantel's Cromwell illustrates both the promise of legal pragmatism—its ability to get results without false compunction about means—but also its dangers: that one may pick the wrong prince, or make flawed or base calculations on how to act. The Wolf Hall trilogy shows this in a manner far more clear and far more vivid than any purely philosophical accounts, and capture something deep about the theory and practice of law. As such, their commentary on the law, authority and governance deserves our close attention.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"39 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126518515","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Law & LiteraturePub Date : 2020-08-18DOI: 10.1080/1535685X.2020.1800313
Jay Parker
{"title":"Divine Violence, Ironic Silence and Poetic Justice in Joseph Conrad’s The Secret Agent","authors":"Jay Parker","doi":"10.1080/1535685X.2020.1800313","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1535685X.2020.1800313","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This essay argues that there is a productive resonance between Joseph Conrad’s political novel The Secret Agent and Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence, that enables an intervention in key debate around the role and status of ambiguity in Benjamin’s theory. Alison Ross, in interpreting Benjamin, has disagreed with Werner Hamacher’s valorisation of ambiguity and in particular his notion of an ‘afformative’ bloodless violence embodied in language. I argue that Conrad draws upon literary techniques, particularly the ironic treatment of silence to explore violence, justice and ambiguity that anticipates elements of Benjamin’s essay. This treatment of Conrad and political theory revolves around a Benjaminian reading of the productive ambiguity of irony in particular and literature in general, to provide a sense of how literature helps us to think through the uncertainties and contradictions of politics and political settlements. Read in relation to Conrad’s novel, Benjamin’s concept of divine violence can be interpreted as a form of poetic violence, a trope frequently read as unfit for elitist modernist art. Yet Conrad situates literature in relation to popular culture to suggest that both are necessary to articulate and reflect critically upon truth. Divine violence as poetic justice emerges as a standard by which the justice of political settlements might itself be judged, whilst Conrad’s pervasive irony provides a productive ambiguity that works to maintain indeterminacy that is necessary to a Benjaminian conception of justice as divine violence.","PeriodicalId":368948,"journal":{"name":"Law & Literature","volume":"16 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124597228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}