Saskia Lettmaier
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199569977
- eISBN:
- 9780191722066
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199569977.001.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Legal History
While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their ...
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While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their subsequent fall from favour. This monograph ties the story of the action's rise and fall between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family, arguing that the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century breach-of-promise suit (a luxuriant blend of both contract and tort) and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were uneasily and fatally, but nonetheless inextricably, entwined. It classifies the ninteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a ‘codification’ of the contemporaneous ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods – the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian, and the post-Victorian periods – and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P. G. Wodehouse, in order to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.Less
While common law actions for breach of promise of marriage originated in the mid-seventeenth century, it was not until the ‘long nineteenth century’ that they saw their rise to prominence and their subsequent fall from favour. This monograph ties the story of the action's rise and fall between 1800 and 1940 to changes in the prevalent conception of woman, her ideal role in society, sexual relations, and the family, arguing that the idiosyncratic nineteenth-century breach-of-promise suit (a luxuriant blend of both contract and tort) and Victorian notions of ideal femininity were uneasily and fatally, but nonetheless inextricably, entwined. It classifies the ninteenth-century breach-of-promise action as a ‘codification’ of the contemporaneous ideal of true womanhood and explores the longer-term implications of this infusion of mythologized femininity for the law, in particular for the position of plaintiffs. Surveying three consecutive time periods – the early nineteenth century, the high Victorian, and the post-Victorian periods – and adopting an interdisciplinary approach that combines the perspectives of legal history, social history, and literary analysis, it argues that the feminizing process, by shaping a cause of action in accordance with an ideal at odds with the very notion of women going to law, imported a fatal structural inconsistency that at first remained obscured, but ultimately vulgarized and undid the cause of action. Alongside more than two hundred and fifty real-life breach-of-promise cases, the book examines literary and cinematic renditions of the breach-of-promise theme, by artists ranging from Charles Dickens to P. G. Wodehouse, in order to expose the subtle yet unmistakable ways in which what happened (and what changed) in the breach-of-promise courtroom influenced the changing representation of the breach-of-promise plaintiff in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature and film.
Martha C. Nussbaum and Alison L. LaCroix (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- January 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199812042
- eISBN:
- 9780199315888
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199812042.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This book focuses on issues of gender in the British novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Hardy and Trollope. Approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds, the ...
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This book focuses on issues of gender in the British novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Hardy and Trollope. Approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds, the chapters reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement by displaying a range of ways in which literature and law can illuminate one another and in which the conversation between them can illuminate deeper human issues with which both disciplines are concerned. These chapters shed light on a range of gender-related issues, from inheritance to money-lending to illegitimacy, but also make an important methodological contribution by displaying (and discussing) a range of methodological perspectives that exemplify the breadth and range of this discipline, which links history, gender studies, philosophy, literary studies, and law.Less
This book focuses on issues of gender in the British novel of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, particularly Hardy and Trollope. Approaching the topic from a variety of backgrounds, the chapters reinvigorate the law-and-literature movement by displaying a range of ways in which literature and law can illuminate one another and in which the conversation between them can illuminate deeper human issues with which both disciplines are concerned. These chapters shed light on a range of gender-related issues, from inheritance to money-lending to illegitimacy, but also make an important methodological contribution by displaying (and discussing) a range of methodological perspectives that exemplify the breadth and range of this discipline, which links history, gender studies, philosophy, literary studies, and law.
Saskia Lettmaier
- Published in print:
- 2010
- Published Online:
- May 2010
- ISBN:
- 9780199569977
- eISBN:
- 9780191722066
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199569977.003.0001
- Subject:
- Law, Legal History
This introductory chapter sets the stage by first establishing links with two fields of scholarship, with regard to which the book can usefully be situated: (i) works examining the interaction ...
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This introductory chapter sets the stage by first establishing links with two fields of scholarship, with regard to which the book can usefully be situated: (i) works examining the interaction between the law and social forces extraneous to the law or, put more crudely, the permeability of the law to cultural ideology; and (ii) nineteenth-century women's history. It then presents the tools of analysis – empiricism and literature – for examining the effects and wider implications of the postulated alliance between the breach-of-promise action and prevalent notions of ideal femininity.Less
This introductory chapter sets the stage by first establishing links with two fields of scholarship, with regard to which the book can usefully be situated: (i) works examining the interaction between the law and social forces extraneous to the law or, put more crudely, the permeability of the law to cultural ideology; and (ii) nineteenth-century women's history. It then presents the tools of analysis – empiricism and literature – for examining the effects and wider implications of the postulated alliance between the breach-of-promise action and prevalent notions of ideal femininity.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0004
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by ...
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Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by plaintiffs entirely unknown to them. This chapter surveys the surprisingly rich yet almost entirely unexplored intersection between literature and libel in the period by providing a broad overview of key cases and legal decisions. As writers increasingly experimented with the roman à clef, judges, juries, and eventually legislators in Great Britain struggled to maintain a clear legal conception of fiction—and the consequences were broad and far-reaching. Publishers demanded sometimes vast changes to manuscripts and the inherent conservatism of libel law became, in the words of one commentator, a “terror to authorship.” Following the particularly far-reaching case of E. Hulton & Co. v. Jones in 1909, the novel itself seemed to teeter on the edge of illegality as the courts proved almost incapable of meeting both the legal and aesthetic challenged posed by the roman à clef’s ability to broach the public sphere. The chapter concludes with a short digest of key acts and legal decisions in Britain and Ireland.Less
Despite the often heroic narratives of modernism’s campaign against antiobscenity laws, writers in the period were much more likely to run afoul of libel suits sometimes brought successfully by plaintiffs entirely unknown to them. This chapter surveys the surprisingly rich yet almost entirely unexplored intersection between literature and libel in the period by providing a broad overview of key cases and legal decisions. As writers increasingly experimented with the roman à clef, judges, juries, and eventually legislators in Great Britain struggled to maintain a clear legal conception of fiction—and the consequences were broad and far-reaching. Publishers demanded sometimes vast changes to manuscripts and the inherent conservatism of libel law became, in the words of one commentator, a “terror to authorship.” Following the particularly far-reaching case of E. Hulton & Co. v. Jones in 1909, the novel itself seemed to teeter on the edge of illegality as the courts proved almost incapable of meeting both the legal and aesthetic challenged posed by the roman à clef’s ability to broach the public sphere. The chapter concludes with a short digest of key acts and legal decisions in Britain and Ireland.
Ayelet Ben-Yishai
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199937646
- eISBN:
- 9780199333110
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199937646.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged ...
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Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged centrality to Victorian culture. Precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. Through this act of recognition and assimilation, it constructs a sense of a common identity essential to the Victorians. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, legal precedent became vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture, as well as to the society in which it operated and the larger culture of which it was part. These qualities extended the impact of precedent beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large. This analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in nineteenth-century culture as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous commonality. Understanding the structure of precedent also explains how fictionality works, its epistemology, and how its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of precedent and the ways in which it enables and facilitates a commonality through time.Less
Common Precedents argues that precedent constitutes a sophisticated and powerful mechanism for managing social and cultural change and that this quality accounts for its unacknowledged centrality to Victorian culture. Precedential reasoning enables the recognition of the new and its assimilation as part of a continuous past. Through this act of recognition and assimilation, it constructs a sense of a common identity essential to the Victorians. By appearing to bring the past seamlessly into the present, legal precedent became vital to the preservation of a sense of commonality and continuity crucial to the common law and Victorian legal culture, as well as to the society in which it operated and the larger culture of which it was part. These qualities extended the impact of precedent beyond legal practices and institutions to the culture at large. This analysis of law and literature shows that precedential reasoning enjoyed widespread cultural significance in nineteenth-century culture as a means of preserving a sense of common history, values and interests in the face of a new heterogeneous commonality. Understanding the structure of precedent also explains how fictionality works, its epistemology, and how its commonalities are socially constructed, maintained, and reified. Common Precedents thus presents a cultural history of precedent and the ways in which it enables and facilitates a commonality through time.
Sean Latham
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- May 2009
- ISBN:
- 9780195379990
- eISBN:
- 9780199869053
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195379990.003.0005
- Subject:
- Literature, 20th-century Literature and Modernism
This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes ...
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This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes of God. Both drew heavily on their own lives—as well as those of nearly everyone they knew—to launch a deliberate critique of the moral, aesthetic, and legal divide between fact and fiction. This forms, in fact, a fundamental aspect of their high modernist aesthetics. The interpenetration of world and text in their major works, however, also led both men into often grave legal trouble, putting their books in limbo and, in Lewis’s case, leading to a seemingly endless string of crippling lawsuits. Far from purely extraliterary events, these legal entanglements are instead an organizing component of the works themselves: the core element of a largely forgotten modernism structured around social, aesthetic, and legal contests between fiction and reality. Forged and circulated in this complex field of force, this chapter examines the ways these experimental texts not only exploit the ambiguities of libel law but are themselves inevitably constrained by its potent ability to adjudicate fact and thereby define the limits of fiction.Less
This chapter explores the way James Joyce and Wyndham Lewis negotiated the legal consequences of their narrative experiments with libel and defamation in key romans à clef like Ulysses and The Apes of God. Both drew heavily on their own lives—as well as those of nearly everyone they knew—to launch a deliberate critique of the moral, aesthetic, and legal divide between fact and fiction. This forms, in fact, a fundamental aspect of their high modernist aesthetics. The interpenetration of world and text in their major works, however, also led both men into often grave legal trouble, putting their books in limbo and, in Lewis’s case, leading to a seemingly endless string of crippling lawsuits. Far from purely extraliterary events, these legal entanglements are instead an organizing component of the works themselves: the core element of a largely forgotten modernism structured around social, aesthetic, and legal contests between fiction and reality. Forged and circulated in this complex field of force, this chapter examines the ways these experimental texts not only exploit the ambiguities of libel law but are themselves inevitably constrained by its potent ability to adjudicate fact and thereby define the limits of fiction.
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 ...
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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.
Marianne Constable, Leti Volpp, and Bryan Wagner (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- January 2020
- ISBN:
- 9780823283712
- eISBN:
- 9780823286164
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Fordham University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5422/fordham/9780823283712.001.0001
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Social and Cultural Anthropology
For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the "wrong places"-sites and spaces in ...
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For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the "wrong places"-sites and spaces in which no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law's constraints. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places brings together essays by leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric to look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture. Many essays look for law in the kinds of "wrong places" where there appears to be no law. They find in these places not only reflections and remains of law, but rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and law's meaning and function. Other essays do the opposite: rather than looking for law in places where law does not obviously appear, they look in statute books and courtrooms from perspectives that are presumed to have nothing to say about law. Looking at law sideways, upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can be gained when law is denied its proper domain.Less
For many inside and outside the legal academy, the right place to look for law is in constitutions, statutes, and judicial opinions. This book looks for law in the "wrong places"-sites and spaces in which no formal law appears. These may be geographic regions beyond the reach of law, everyday practices ungoverned or ungovernable by law, or works of art that have escaped law's constraints. Looking for Law in All the Wrong Places brings together essays by leading scholars of anthropology, cultural studies, history, law, literature, political science, race and ethnic studies, religion, and rhetoric to look at law from the standpoint of the humanities. Beyond showing law to be determined by or determinative of distinct cultural phenomena, the contributors show how law is itself interwoven with language, text, image, and culture. Many essays look for law in the kinds of "wrong places" where there appears to be no law. They find in these places not only reflections and remains of law, but rules and practices that seem indistinguishable from law and raise challenging questions about the locations of law and law's meaning and function. Other essays do the opposite: rather than looking for law in places where law does not obviously appear, they look in statute books and courtrooms from perspectives that are presumed to have nothing to say about law. Looking at law sideways, upside down, or inside out defamiliarizes law. These essays show what legal understanding can be gained when law is denied its proper domain.
Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190456368
- eISBN:
- 9780190456399
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456368.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
While law and literature represents one of the most enduring sites of interdisciplinary inquiry, the field has recently expanded in a wide range of exciting new directions. Since its inception, law ...
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While law and literature represents one of the most enduring sites of interdisciplinary inquiry, the field has recently expanded in a wide range of exciting new directions. Since its inception, law and literature has inspired taxonomies of the field, and the Introduction evaluates the limits and merits of those existing categorical schemes. It assesses frequent critiques of law and literature, while developing a framework for conceptualizing the many methodological and other innovations transforming the field. In particular, it emphasizes five new directions, considering the influence of history and political theory, efforts to globalize the field, the broadening of focus beyond legal texts along with changes in legal hermeneutics, attempts to transcend suspicion and critique, and new work on the imagination.Less
While law and literature represents one of the most enduring sites of interdisciplinary inquiry, the field has recently expanded in a wide range of exciting new directions. Since its inception, law and literature has inspired taxonomies of the field, and the Introduction evaluates the limits and merits of those existing categorical schemes. It assesses frequent critiques of law and literature, while developing a framework for conceptualizing the many methodological and other innovations transforming the field. In particular, it emphasizes five new directions, considering the influence of history and political theory, efforts to globalize the field, the broadening of focus beyond legal texts along with changes in legal hermeneutics, attempts to transcend suspicion and critique, and new work on the imagination.
Saul Levmore and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780199331376
- eISBN:
- 9780199394258
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199331376.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, American, 20th Century Literature, World Literature
This book comprises sixteen essays from legal academics, literary experts, and influential judges. The book begins by investigating American Guys—the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists ...
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This book comprises sixteen essays from legal academics, literary experts, and influential judges. The book begins by investigating American Guys—the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists who populate American fiction. It then examines these manly men in relation to the law, while also highlighting the tensions underlying and complicating this type of masculinity. A second set of chapters examines Outsiders—men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. Chapters take up countertraditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Eli Roth’s Jewish lawyer. This book is the third in a series of volumes arising out of conferences at the University of Chicago Law School. Like its predecessors, this collection aims to reinvigorate the study of law and literature by broadening the range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the subject.Less
This book comprises sixteen essays from legal academics, literary experts, and influential judges. The book begins by investigating American Guys—the heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists who populate American fiction. It then examines these manly men in relation to the law, while also highlighting the tensions underlying and complicating this type of masculinity. A second set of chapters examines Outsiders—men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. Chapters take up countertraditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Eli Roth’s Jewish lawyer. This book is the third in a series of volumes arising out of conferences at the University of Chicago Law School. Like its predecessors, this collection aims to reinvigorate the study of law and literature by broadening the range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives brought to bear on the subject.
Johan Van Der Walt
- Published in print:
- 2014
- Published Online:
- September 2014
- ISBN:
- 9780804790819
- eISBN:
- 9780804791861
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Stanford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.11126/stanford/9780804790819.003.0003
- Subject:
- Law, Philosophy of Law
Law and the utopian imagination constitute a constellation of two opposite responses to disrupting events. Attempts at resettling the social in the wake of unsettling events ultimately resort to law ...
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Law and the utopian imagination constitute a constellation of two opposite responses to disrupting events. Attempts at resettling the social in the wake of unsettling events ultimately resort to law for purposes of restoring order. This restoration, however, is just one possible response to the event. Utopian responses discern in events the promise of a release from the generic prohibitions and inhibitions that law imposes on liberty. They discern in events a utopian release from law in every possible sense of the word and thus also from laws of language and standard communication. The ultimate utopian concern with the event thus finds expression in literature and art that resist the laws of standardised language in order to invoke, or at least allude to, experiences that cannot be communicated in language without betraying it.Less
Law and the utopian imagination constitute a constellation of two opposite responses to disrupting events. Attempts at resettling the social in the wake of unsettling events ultimately resort to law for purposes of restoring order. This restoration, however, is just one possible response to the event. Utopian responses discern in events the promise of a release from the generic prohibitions and inhibitions that law imposes on liberty. They discern in events a utopian release from law in every possible sense of the word and thus also from laws of language and standard communication. The ultimate utopian concern with the event thus finds expression in literature and art that resist the laws of standardised language in order to invoke, or at least allude to, experiences that cannot be communicated in language without betraying it.
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 ...
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“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.
Kenneth Reid
- Published in print:
- 2000
- Published Online:
- March 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780198267782
- eISBN:
- 9780191683374
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198267782.003.0003
- Subject:
- Law, Constitutional and Administrative Law, Legal History
This chapter is concerned with the law of property. The fact that a legal system is ‘mixed’ does not imply consistency in the mixture, whether measured by subject or by time. Not only may the ...
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This chapter is concerned with the law of property. The fact that a legal system is ‘mixed’ does not imply consistency in the mixture, whether measured by subject or by time. Not only may the proportions differ from subject to subject, but the ingredients themselves may not be the same. The first part of this chapter seeks to examine, through historical eyes, the mixture of sources and influences which make up the law of property. The second part considers the literature of the law, and the attempts to bind the disparate sources into some kind of a unified theory. In the final part there is a brief consideration of two doctrines which, in different ways, typify the law of property in Scotland. These doctrines are the doctrine of possession and the law of the tenement.Less
This chapter is concerned with the law of property. The fact that a legal system is ‘mixed’ does not imply consistency in the mixture, whether measured by subject or by time. Not only may the proportions differ from subject to subject, but the ingredients themselves may not be the same. The first part of this chapter seeks to examine, through historical eyes, the mixture of sources and influences which make up the law of property. The second part considers the literature of the law, and the attempts to bind the disparate sources into some kind of a unified theory. In the final part there is a brief consideration of two doctrines which, in different ways, typify the law of property in Scotland. These doctrines are the doctrine of possession and the law of the tenement.
Faith Barter
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- May 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780748697908
- eISBN:
- 9781474416061
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748697908.003.0012
- Subject:
- Law, Philosophy of Law
Faith Barter renews the conjunction of law and literature through the lens of ‘their shared interest in troubling the definition of the human’. Bartleby, in Melville’s story, traverses the superhuman ...
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Faith Barter renews the conjunction of law and literature through the lens of ‘their shared interest in troubling the definition of the human’. Bartleby, in Melville’s story, traverses the superhuman and the subhuman, rendering him illegible and object-like to his frustrated employer, while the young girl in Coetzee’s novella (who is already, as a native, deemed non-human by the law of the Empire) approaches objecthood by virtue of the indecipherable traces of imperial torture she bears. Barter examines the twin dilemmas in Melville’s and Coetzee’s texts while also placing them into dialogue with the infamous 1857 Scott v. Sandford opinion of the US Supreme Court. She analyses the three texts along a temporal axis, from which emerges a set of dynamic historical oscillations and intertextual patterns of world-building. Suspicious of the ‘complete[] singular[ity]’ of law, conceived as a mode of existence,
Barter reframes the relationship of law and literature by passing each through the partial regional ontology of the other, opening up a space for the interrogation of a new hybridity: literature as law. Perhaps all modes of existence are also, simultaneously and necessarily, modes of coexistence.Less
Faith Barter renews the conjunction of law and literature through the lens of ‘their shared interest in troubling the definition of the human’. Bartleby, in Melville’s story, traverses the superhuman and the subhuman, rendering him illegible and object-like to his frustrated employer, while the young girl in Coetzee’s novella (who is already, as a native, deemed non-human by the law of the Empire) approaches objecthood by virtue of the indecipherable traces of imperial torture she bears. Barter examines the twin dilemmas in Melville’s and Coetzee’s texts while also placing them into dialogue with the infamous 1857 Scott v. Sandford opinion of the US Supreme Court. She analyses the three texts along a temporal axis, from which emerges a set of dynamic historical oscillations and intertextual patterns of world-building. Suspicious of the ‘complete[] singular[ity]’ of law, conceived as a mode of existence,
Barter reframes the relationship of law and literature by passing each through the partial regional ontology of the other, opening up a space for the interrogation of a new hybridity: literature as law. Perhaps all modes of existence are also, simultaneously and necessarily, modes of coexistence.
Christopher N. Warren
- Published in print:
- 2015
- Published Online:
- August 2015
- ISBN:
- 9780198719342
- eISBN:
- 9780191788550
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198719342.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 16th-century and Renaissance Literature, Criticism/Theory
The purpose of this chapter is to develop a broad rationale for a more literary history of international law and to set the conceptual groundwork for the chapters that follow. It uses a range of ...
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The purpose of this chapter is to develop a broad rationale for a more literary history of international law and to set the conceptual groundwork for the chapters that follow. It uses a range of examples including Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and William Empson’s “Legal Fiction” to sketch the book’s premises, argument, key terms, and methodologies. It argues that a literary history of international law gives fuller accounts—both of early modern literature and of the history of international law. A literary history of international law generates new appreciation for the deeply generic structure of modern international law and of the related rise of an aesthetic field putatively separated from international legal and political thought.Less
The purpose of this chapter is to develop a broad rationale for a more literary history of international law and to set the conceptual groundwork for the chapters that follow. It uses a range of examples including Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and William Empson’s “Legal Fiction” to sketch the book’s premises, argument, key terms, and methodologies. It argues that a literary history of international law gives fuller accounts—both of early modern literature and of the history of international law. A literary history of international law generates new appreciation for the deeply generic structure of modern international law and of the related rise of an aesthetic field putatively separated from international legal and political thought.
Brook Thomas
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190456368
- eISBN:
- 9780190456399
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456368.003.0002
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
The chapter looks at new directions in law and literature from James Boyd White’s 1973 publication of The Legal Imagination to Julie Stone Peters’s 2005 announcement of the end of a movement. It ...
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The chapter looks at new directions in law and literature from James Boyd White’s 1973 publication of The Legal Imagination to Julie Stone Peters’s 2005 announcement of the end of a movement. It focuses on different institutional spaces in which interdisciplinary work took place, including spaces outside the United States. This period saw developments in questions of politics, ethics, and aesthetics; drama, narrative, and interpretation; equity, sovereignty, and jurisdiction; race, class, and gender; copyright and censorship; torts and contracts; economics, marriage, inheritance, and crime. Thomas compares the rise of various organizations and journals devoted to law, literature, and the humanities with ones devoted to law and society. He stresses the continued need for scholars to engage work done in different spaces and times.Less
The chapter looks at new directions in law and literature from James Boyd White’s 1973 publication of The Legal Imagination to Julie Stone Peters’s 2005 announcement of the end of a movement. It focuses on different institutional spaces in which interdisciplinary work took place, including spaces outside the United States. This period saw developments in questions of politics, ethics, and aesthetics; drama, narrative, and interpretation; equity, sovereignty, and jurisdiction; race, class, and gender; copyright and censorship; torts and contracts; economics, marriage, inheritance, and crime. Thomas compares the rise of various organizations and journals devoted to law, literature, and the humanities with ones devoted to law and society. He stresses the continued need for scholars to engage work done in different spaces and times.
Andrea Bianchi
- Published in print:
- 2016
- Published Online:
- January 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780198725114
- eISBN:
- 9780191792533
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780198725114.003.0014
- Subject:
- Law, Public International Law, Philosophy of Law
Law and literature have a certain affinity, as they both are concerned with the interpretation of texts and shape reality through language. After distinguishing between ‘law in literature’ and ‘law ...
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Law and literature have a certain affinity, as they both are concerned with the interpretation of texts and shape reality through language. After distinguishing between ‘law in literature’ and ‘law as literature’, this chapter sets out to engage with the main insights of the movement. The latter include the emphasis on the narrative structure of international law and the use of rhetoric in legal argumentation. Furthermore, the way in which literary criticism deals with the interpretation of texts may provide useful insights on how legal interpretation actually works. Finally, by putting the human condition at the centre of analysis and by drawing attention to the concrete experiences of the individual, Law and Literature aims to mitigate the abstract rationalization of the law and to create empathy and awareness that all those who are the subjects or the addressees of legal rules are also individuals in specific historically-situated, real contexts.Less
Law and literature have a certain affinity, as they both are concerned with the interpretation of texts and shape reality through language. After distinguishing between ‘law in literature’ and ‘law as literature’, this chapter sets out to engage with the main insights of the movement. The latter include the emphasis on the narrative structure of international law and the use of rhetoric in legal argumentation. Furthermore, the way in which literary criticism deals with the interpretation of texts may provide useful insights on how legal interpretation actually works. Finally, by putting the human condition at the centre of analysis and by drawing attention to the concrete experiences of the individual, Law and Literature aims to mitigate the abstract rationalization of the law and to create empathy and awareness that all those who are the subjects or the addressees of legal rules are also individuals in specific historically-situated, real contexts.
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 ...
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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.
Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler (eds)
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- June 2017
- ISBN:
- 9780190456368
- eISBN:
- 9780190456399
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780190456368.001.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, Criticism/Theory
After the heyday of the law and literature movement in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether it would retain vitality and influence. Yet in recent years, scholarship in law and literature ...
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After the heyday of the law and literature movement in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether it would retain vitality and influence. Yet in recent years, scholarship in law and literature continues to flourish, broadening into a number of new directions. This collection of essays by twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field, at the same time as it takes stock of many of the new directions shaping the interdiscipline. In so doing, New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the innovative methodological approaches that helped to enlarge the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of insights from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and the expansion of study beyond the text to performance and the image. Other essays instead grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, or competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law’s construction of racialized bodies. Together, the essays in this volume offer a diverse, evolving portrait of the wide variety of work in law and literature, and in the process they likewise chart new lines of inquiry that beginning scholars might pursue.Less
After the heyday of the law and literature movement in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether it would retain vitality and influence. Yet in recent years, scholarship in law and literature continues to flourish, broadening into a number of new directions. This collection of essays by twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field, at the same time as it takes stock of many of the new directions shaping the interdiscipline. In so doing, New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the innovative methodological approaches that helped to enlarge the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of insights from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and the expansion of study beyond the text to performance and the image. Other essays instead grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, or competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law’s construction of racialized bodies. Together, the essays in this volume offer a diverse, evolving portrait of the wide variety of work in law and literature, and in the process they likewise chart new lines of inquiry that beginning scholars might pursue.
Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226924939
- eISBN:
- 9780226924946
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226924946.003.0016
- Subject:
- Literature, Shakespeare Studies
This chapter is a transcript of a conference that took place at the University of Chicago Law School in May of 2009. Springing from a seminar of Shakespeare and the law taught by Richard Posner, ...
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This chapter is a transcript of a conference that took place at the University of Chicago Law School in May of 2009. Springing from a seminar of Shakespeare and the law taught by Richard Posner, Richard Strier, and Martha Nussbaum, the conference was a rekindling of the law-and-literature movement that seemed to them to have made little progress in recent years. It also includes Justice Stephen Breyer, the guest of the three professors and the selector of the plays that are discussed in the chapter: Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and As You Like It. The chapter, then, consolidates the conversation and discussion generated by this roundtable of thinkers regarding the relationship between law and literature, a timely conference that coincided with the release of the third edition of Judge Posner's Law and Literature.Less
This chapter is a transcript of a conference that took place at the University of Chicago Law School in May of 2009. Springing from a seminar of Shakespeare and the law taught by Richard Posner, Richard Strier, and Martha Nussbaum, the conference was a rekindling of the law-and-literature movement that seemed to them to have made little progress in recent years. It also includes Justice Stephen Breyer, the guest of the three professors and the selector of the plays that are discussed in the chapter: Hamlet, Measure for Measure, and As You Like It. The chapter, then, consolidates the conversation and discussion generated by this roundtable of thinkers regarding the relationship between law and literature, a timely conference that coincided with the release of the third edition of Judge Posner's Law and Literature.
