Jeanne Gaakeer
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- September 2019
- ISBN:
- 9781474442480
- eISBN:
- 9781474460286
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474442480.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Philosophy of Law
Judging from Experience forms part of Law and Literature and/or, more broadly, Law and Humanities, the interdisciplinary movement in legal theory that focuses on the various bonds of law, language ...
More
Judging from Experience forms part of Law and Literature and/or, more broadly, Law and Humanities, the interdisciplinary movement in legal theory that focuses on the various bonds of law, language and literature. The book presents a view on law as a humanistic discipline. It demonstrates the importance for academic legal theory and legal practice of a iuris prudentia as insighful knowledge of law that helps develop the practitioner’s practical wisdom. In doing so it builds on insights from philosophical hermeneutics ranging from Aristotle to Ricoeur. The building blocks it proposes for law as praxis are indicative of a methodological reflection on interdisciplinary studies in law and the humanities and of the development of legal narratology.The book engages with literary works such as Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and McEwan’s The Children Act to illuminate its arguments and offer a specific European perspective on the topics discussed.
The author combines her understanding of legal theory and judicial practice in a continental-European civil-law system, and, within it, in the field of criminal law, to propose a perspective on law as part of the humanities that can inspire both legal professionals and advanced students of law. Thus the book is also a reflection of the author’s combined passions of judicial practice and Law and Literature.Less
Judging from Experience forms part of Law and Literature and/or, more broadly, Law and Humanities, the interdisciplinary movement in legal theory that focuses on the various bonds of law, language and literature. The book presents a view on law as a humanistic discipline. It demonstrates the importance for academic legal theory and legal practice of a iuris prudentia as insighful knowledge of law that helps develop the practitioner’s practical wisdom. In doing so it builds on insights from philosophical hermeneutics ranging from Aristotle to Ricoeur. The building blocks it proposes for law as praxis are indicative of a methodological reflection on interdisciplinary studies in law and the humanities and of the development of legal narratology.The book engages with literary works such as Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet, Musil’s The Man without Qualities, and McEwan’s The Children Act to illuminate its arguments and offer a specific European perspective on the topics discussed.
The author combines her understanding of legal theory and judicial practice in a continental-European civil-law system, and, within it, in the field of criminal law, to propose a perspective on law as part of the humanities that can inspire both legal professionals and advanced students of law. Thus the book is also a reflection of the author’s combined passions of judicial practice and Law and Literature.
Peter Leman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621136
- eISBN:
- 9781800341227
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621136.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
“Singing the Law” is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial ...
More
“Singing the Law” is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, I begin with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., they both promote and retreat from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.Less
“Singing the Law” is about the legal lives and afterlives of oral cultures in East Africa, particularly as they appear within the pages of written literatures during the colonial and postcolonial periods. In examining these cultures, I begin with an analysis of the cultural narratives of time and modernity that formed the foundations of British colonial law. Recognizing the contradictory nature of these narratives (i.e., they both promote and retreat from the Euro-centric ideal of temporal progress) enables us to make sense of the many representations of and experiments with non-linear, open-ended, and otherwise experimental temporalities that we find in works of East African literature that take colonial law as a subject or point of critique. Many of these works, furthermore, consciously appropriate orature as an expressive form with legal authority. This affords them the capacity to challenge the narrative foundations of colonial law and its postcolonial residues and offer alternative models of temporality and modernity that give rise, in turn, to alternative forms of legality. East Africa’s “oral jurisprudence” ultimately has implications not only for our understanding of law and literature in colonial and postcolonial contexts, but more broadly for our understanding of how the global south has shaped modern law as we know and experience it today.
Peter Leman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781789621136
- eISBN:
- 9781800341227
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Liverpool University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3828/liverpool/9781789621136.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial ...
More
The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature with the force of subversion as well as restoration. I conclude with a discussion of East Africa’s important but misunderstood place in the history and development of modern law.Less
The introductory chapter establishes a critical framework for reading oral jurisprudence in East Africa in relationship to narratives of temporality in British colonial law, colonial and postcolonial literatures, and modern law generally. I begin with a brief analysis of the 2012 trial Mutua and others v. The Foreign Commonwealth Office to illustrate the relationship between law and time and the lasting effects of the British Empire’s “crisis of modernity,” or simultaneous promotion of and retreat from modernity as it faced resistance in the colonies. I then theorize the oral-legalistic strategies that colonial subjects developed to exploit this crisis and restore, imaginatively at first, what was lost in the encounter with colonial time. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has argued that orature, in particular, “played the most important role” in anti-colonial struggles, and this is so because of its relationship to the deep history of colonial law, which unwittingly empowered legalistic orature with the force of subversion as well as restoration. I conclude with a discussion of East Africa’s important but misunderstood place in the history and development of modern law.