The Literary Exception And The Rule Of Law

Addressing the influential analysis of law and literature, this book offers a new perspective on their relationship. The law and literature movement that has gained global prominence in the course of last decades of the twentieth and the first decades of the twenty-first centuries has provided the research and teaching of law with a considerable body of new and valuable knowledge and understanding. Most of the knowledge and insights generated by the movement concern either a thematic overlap between legal and literary discourses – suggesting they deal with the same moral concerns – or a rhetorical, semiotic or general linguistic comparability or ‘sameness’ between them – imputing to both the same or very similar narrative structures. The Literary Exception and the Rule of Law recognises the wealth of knowledge generated by this approach to the relationship between law and literature, and acknowledges its debt to this genre of scholarship. It nevertheless also proposes, on the basis of a number of revealing phenomenological inquiries, a different approach to law and literary studies: one that emphasises the irreducible difference between law and literature. It does so with the firm believe that a regard for the very different and indeed opposite discursive trajectories of legal and literary language allows for a more profound understanding of the unique and indeed separate roles that the discourses of law and literature generally play in the sustenance of relatively stable legal cultures. This important rethinking of the relationship between law and literature will appeal to scholars and students of legal theory, jurisprudence, philosophy, politics and literary theory.

This book fills a major gap in the ever-increasing secondary literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought by providing a dedicated and coherent treatment of the many, various and interesting things which Arendt had to say about law. Often obscured by more pressing or more controversial aspects of her work, Arendt nonetheless had interesting insights into Greek and Roman concepts of law, human rights, constitutional design, legislation, sovereignty, international tribunals, judicial review and much more. This book retrieves these aspects of her legal philosophy for the attention of both Arendt scholars and lawyers alike. The book brings together lawyers as well as Arendt scholars drawn from a range of disciplines (philosophy, political science, international relations), who have engaged in an internal debate the dynamism of which is captured in print. Following the editors' introduction, the book is split into four Parts: Part I explores the concept of law in Arendt's thought; Part II explores legal aspects of Arendt's constitutional thought: first locating Arendt in the wider tradition of republican constitutionalism, before turning attention to the role of courts and the role of parliament in her constitutional design. In Part III Arendt's thought on international law is explored from a variety of perspectives, covering international institutions and international criminal law, as well as the theoretical foundations of international law. Part IV debates the foundations, content and meaning of Arendt's famous and influential claim that the 'right to have rights' is the one true human right.

Imagined States examines representations of the law in British and Nigerian high-brow, middle-brow and popular fiction and journalism. It reads works by Chinua Achebe, Joyce Cary, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace, together with a range of Nigerian market literature and journalism.

In this book the authors work on an innovative comparison between law and literature, starting from the modes in which law and literature function: they read law and literature as arts of compromising.

The theme arises from the legal-academic movement "Law and Literature". This newly developed field should aim at two major goals, first, to investigate the meaning of law in a social context by questioning how the characters appearing in literary works understand and behave themselves to the law (law in literature), and second, to find out a theoretical solution of the methodological question whether and to what extent the legal text can be interpreted objectively in comparison with the question how literary works should be interpreted (law as literature). The subject of justice and injustice has been covered not only in treatises of law and philosophy, but also in many works of literature: On the one hand, poets and writers have been outraged at the social conditions of their time. On the other hand, some of them have also contributed fundamental reflections on the idea of justice itself.

Taking Exception to the Law explores how a range of early modern English writings responded to injustices perpetrated by legal procedures, discourses, and institutions. From canonical poems and plays to crime pamphlets and educational treatises, the essays engage with the relevance and wide appeal of legal questions in order to understand how literature operated in the early modern period. Justice in its many forms – legal, poetic, divine, natural, and customary – is examined through insightful and innovative analyses of a number of texts, including The Merchant of Venice, The Faerie Queene, and Paradise Lost. A major contribution to the growing field of law and literature, this collection offers cultural contexts, interpretive insights, and formal implications for the entire field of English Renaissance culture.

The book examines trends in American literature and sheds new light on the legal history of race relations during the Progressive Era.

The essays in this volume investigate themes related to the place of law in Byzantine ideology and society. Was this a society which was meant to be governed by law? For answers, these essays look to the intent of the legislators; the attitudes toward the law; the relationship between law, religion, literature, and art.