Law and Literature

The Notion of Justice in _The Merchant of Venice_

by Tuba Geyikler Terci

Co-authored with Emre Cumalıoğlu, PhD.

"John Hayward," in The Encyclopedia of English Renaissance Literature, ed. Alan Stewart and Garrett Sullivan (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012).

by Elizabeth Pentland

Constituição, Utopia e Utopismo - O Exemplo da Constituição Cidadã Brasileira

by Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

in "Revista Jurídica Cesumar – Mestrado",  vol. 9, n.º 1, 2009, pp. 35-55.

Sumário: A Questão Conceitual. 1.1 Constituintes, Mito e Utopia; 2 O Género Literário Constituição; 3 Utopia e... more Sumário: A Questão Conceitual. 1.1 Constituintes, Mito e Utopia; 2 O Género Literário Constituição; 3 Utopia e Constituição; 4 Categorias; 4.1 Os grandes paradigmas ou épocas (tempos) do Direito; 4.2 As grandes formas de pensamento crítico; 5 O Lugar e o Papel da Constituição; 6 Utopia e Utopismo na Constituição Cidadã brasileira; 6.1 Os Valores e o Preâmbulo; 6.2 Alguns traços de utopismo constitucional; 7 O Paradigma da Cláusula Geral e o Paradigma Detalhista; 8 Conclusão. De novo os Conceitos e as Coisas: utopia e utopismo; Referências.

Fernando Pessoa, Hermenêutica e Retórica Jurídica

by Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

in "Nova Águia", n.º 7, 2011, pp. 41-44.

Um curioso aspecto do pensamento de Pessoa foi deixado por ele esparso, e o que parece totalmente ao acaso dos... more Um curioso aspecto do pensamento de Pessoa foi deixado por ele esparso, e o que parece totalmente ao acaso dos investigadores: o Direito. Em política, temos até um auto-retrato bastante completo, e a sucessão de textos que foi escrevendo, em prosa e em verso, facilmente nos permite reconstruir um percurso, a partir das suas bases ideológicas. Mas o que pensaria Pessoa do Direito? Neste caso, o “fingidor” não fingiu, não posou para a sua tão cuidadosamente preparada fama póstuma. Estamos, assim, perante um aspecto da sua vida mental que parece ter escapado à composição para um público (ainda que futuro), o que é, afinal de contas (sem fazer das fraquezas forças) uma situação apesar de tudo invejável... O presente artigo procura surpreender Pessoa a dialogar com um texto jurídico, elaborando um texto jurídico: um texto de resposta a um edital de um concurso para um lugar...

O Direito e o "Pequeno Príncipe" (o "Principezinho")

by Paulo Ferreira da Cunha

in "Videre - Faculdade de Direito e Relações Internacionais", Dourados Ano 2, n.º 3, 2010, pp. 9-25

Nem sempre é fácil deixarmo-nos seduzir pelo direito. Ele apresenta-se oculto, invisível para os olhos, na sua... more Nem sempre é fácil deixarmo-nos seduzir pelo direito. Ele apresenta-se oculto, invisível para os olhos, na sua dimensão mais pura, mais justa, e muitas vezes dele só captamos a tópica sociológica, e seus sinais exteriores: quantas vezes de puro arbítrio e violência. Contudo ele é objeto da justiça, que é constante e perpétua sede de atribuir retamente o seu de cada um. Não numa perspectiva titularista, mas mais aberta e mais sensível à justiça social, porque todos temos direitos pelo fato de sermos pessoas.

Queen Caroline's Pains and Penalties: Silence and Speech in the Dramatic Art of the British Women's Suffrage Movement in Law and Literature, 24.1, 2012, pp. 40-58. published by University of California Press

by Katharine Cockin

In Britain, the act that launched the militant campaign of the suffragettes in 1905 was the interruption of a... more In Britain, the act that launched the militant campaign of the suffragettes in 1905 was the interruption of a political meeting in Manchester. The violent silencing and arrest of the women ensued. The women’s suffrage campaigns in Britain became more vigorous in the early twentieth century.
They frequently foregrounded the oppressive silencing of women in their political speeches at public meetings, in newspapers, and in the courts. Having deliberately sought arrest, some militant suffrage activists exploited the arena of the court room to expound on their political position. In various
audacious and spectacular ways, the exclusion of women from the democratic process was challenged, not least by a sustained attack on the legal system. Drama, one of the more successful cultural forms of protest, was often used to expose the inequities of the existing social fabric, and
as an aesthetic form it deploys the body as well as the voice. This paper will examine the forceful, antirhetorical function of silence in British women’s suffrage drama from the early twentieth century, focusing on the appropriation of Queen Caroline (1768–1821) as a silent proto-suffragette in Pains and Penalties, a play about her trial, written by Laurence Housman (1865–1959) and directed by Edith Craig for the Pioneer Players theater society.
Keywords: women’s suffrage drama / censorship / suffragettes / trial / parliament / monarchy

Measure for Measure: On Law and Forgiveness

by Hans Petter Graver

Published in Dialogues on Justice (2012)
Ed. by Porsdam, Helle / Elholm, Thomas

Popular Evolutionism: Scientific, Legal and Literary Discourse in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters

by Phoebe Poon

Published in Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture and the Art of Fiction: Essays for the Bicentenary, ed. Sandro Jung (Academia Press, 2010).

Popular Evolutionism: Scientific, Legal and Literary Discourse in Gaskell's Wives and Daughters

by Phoebe Poon

Published in Elizabeth Gaskell, Victorian Culture and the Art of Fiction: Essays for the Bicentenary, ed. Sandro Jung (Academia Press, 2010).

A New Tortious Interference with Contractual Relations: Gender and Erotic Triangles in Lumley v. Gye

by Sarah Swan

The tort of interference with contractual relations has many puzzling features that conflict with fundamental... more The tort of interference with contractual relations has many puzzling features that conflict with fundamental principles of contract and tort law. This Article considers how gender influenced the structure of the tort and gave rise to many of these anomalies. Lumley v. Gye, the English case that first established interference with contractual relations, arose from a specifically gendered dispute: two men fighting over a woman. This type of male—male—female configuration creates an erotic triangle, a common archetype in Western culture. The causes of action that served as the legal precedents for interference with contractual relations – enticement, seduction, and criminal conversation – are previous instances where the law regulated gendered triangular conflicts. Enticement prohibited a rival male from taking another man‘s servant, seduction prohibited a rival male from taking another man‘s daughter, and criminal conversation prohibited a rival male from taking another man‘s wife.
In Lumley v. Gye, the court expanded these precedents and created a cause of action that allowed Lumley to bring an action against his male rival for essentially ―taking‖ his contracted female employee. The gendered basis for the tort explains its most problematic aspects, including why it imposes obligations on non-contractual parties, ignores the role of the breaching promisor in causing the wrong, and treats her as the property of the original promisee. In order to remedy these problematic features, the tort should be restructured as one of mixed joint liability. Further, damages should be limited to those available in contract.

Pourquoi un contrat juridique pour le pacte ‘faustien’?

by Monica Lopez Lerma

Revue Interdisciplinaire d’Etudes Juridiques (R.I.E.J.), 50 (2003): 189-222.

OF ENCHANTMENT: THE PASSING OF THE ORDEALS AND THE RISE OF THE JURY TRIAL

by Trisha Olson

This link should work now, I goofed previously. Any comments or criticism is truly welcome for learning from others is a joy.

The Medieval Blood Sanction and the Divine Beneficence of Pain: 1100 - 1450

by Trisha Olson

As always, interested in comments and others' wisdom.

Medieval Snuff Drama

by Jody Enders

Exemplaria 10.1 (1998): 171-206.

This was the piece that led to Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends. Over a decade later, I still find it... more This was the piece that led to Death by Drama and Other Medieval Urban Legends. Over a decade later, I still find it fascinating that the Middle Ages had its own snuff stories, along with a host of other legends about all those mysterious things that never really happen at the theater . . . but people still believe them anyway. The medieval folklore puts to shame even all those legends about "method actors" going mad while playing madness. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

Theater Makes History: Ritual Murder by Proxy in the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie

by Jody Enders

Speculum 79 (October 2004): 991-1016.

The Spectacle of the Scaffolding

by Jody Enders

Theatre Journal 56.2 (May 2004):  163-81

This essay takes as its point of departure one of the earliest extant records of the French medieval stage which has... more This essay takes as its point of departure one of the earliest extant records of the French medieval stage which has nonetheless been effaced from most histories: the gang-rape of a woman in 1395 on the eve of some theatrical festivities. Arguing for a more complete context, Enders interrogates the numerous historiographical intersections of theatre, law, performativity, and intentionality as she revises certain politically correct pieties which tend to dismiss the very real dangers of theatre. In this case, those dangers speak to a troubling shared space of premeditation for theatre and rape, both of which follow analogous paths from imagination to enactment, virtuality to actuality.

“Memories and Allegories of the Death Penalty: Back to the Medieval Future?”

by Jody Enders

In Thinking Allegory Otherwise. Ed. Brenda Machosky, 37-59. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009.

Drawing on several stunningly visual fifteenth-century burnings at the stake, I argue that medieval law made conscious... more Drawing on several stunningly visual fifteenth-century burnings at the stake, I argue that medieval law made conscious use of mnemonic techniques not only to stage, pictorialize, and allegorize the death penalty but to "re-allegorize" the execution of criminals in such a way as to make images of justice unforgettable. Centuries before Michel Foucault ever spoke of the "spectacle of the scaffold," the Northern French city of Metz, for example, brought to the scaffold of an infanticidal mother a wooden doll which they placed in her charred arms along with "a painting of a child around her neck in order to signify the crime that she had committed." This unusual combination of a painting from the visual arts and a prop from the world of theater sheds new light on both the nature of any legal "exhibit" and on the symbolic systems of law itself. Just as one of the canonical functions of poetry is to “make new again” a tired old cliché or a metaphor, so too here do pictorialization, memory, theatricality, and staging reanimate and "re-allegorize" one of the great dead metaphors of the law: to "make an example of someone”—and do so in ways that lend new meaning to the term legal representation. Moreover, in a country like the U.S. where our own vernacular makes room for a term like "burned in effigy" and where the Bush administration emphasized what kind of spectacular dissemination of carnage the Iraqi people need to see in order to believe allegedly justifiable deaths (such as the deaths of the sons of Saddam Hussein), this process is not quite as medieval as one might suspect.

Charlotte Frew, 'The Marriage to a Deceased Wife's Sister Narrative: A Comparison of Novels' (2012) 24 2 Law and Literature (forthcoming July 2012)

by Charlotte Frew

Published by University of California Press

Lord Lyndhurst’s Act made marriage to a deceased wife’s sister illegal in England in 1835. This sparked a seven decade... more Lord Lyndhurst’s Act made marriage to a deceased wife’s sister illegal in England in 1835. This sparked a seven decade debate in parliament, pamphlets, press and fiction which led to the legalisation of deceased wife’s sister unions throughout the Australian colonies in the 1870s and in England in 1907. Pro-reformers and anti-reformers attempted to dominate the debate with their respective characterisations of the men and women who engaged in such unions. This article compares fictional representations of the sister-in-law marriage plot in England and colonial Australia, differences in pro-reform themes, and the respective legislative outcomes.

La Naissance de l'Auteur: Origines Politique et Juridique d'un Concept Littéraire

by Benoit Frydman

published online in International Journal for the Semiotics of Law
DOI: 10.1007/s11196-011-9228-7

Si le concept d’auteur est une notion centrale de la littérature et de la théorie littéraire, il s’agit d’abord d’une... more Si le concept d’auteur est une notion centrale de la littérature et de la théorie littéraire, il s’agit d’abord d’une notion juridique qui a été mobilisée par les philosophes modernes, en particulier Hobbes et Spinoza, dans le but politique et scientifique de lutter contre le régime traditionnel des autorités et de défendre la liberté de pensée contre les interprétations normatives des docteurs de la loi et de la religion. L’article remonte aux origines politiques et juridiques de l’auteur-législateur moderne et retrace sa marche vers la Souveraineté.

The Ghosts of Justice and the Law of Historical Memory

by Monica Lopez Lerma

Conserveries mémorielles [En ligne], #9 | 2011, mis en ligne le 15 avril 2011,