Bøker i Law & Literature-serien

Ancient declamation defies easy categorization. It stands at the crossroads of several modern disciplines. This book contains essays from international scholars, that engages with the multidisciplinary nature of ancient declamation, focusing on the interactions in declamation between rhetoric, literature, law, and ethics.

Scientific experiments and medical improvements in recent years have augmented our bodies, made them manipulable; our personal data have been downloaded, stored, sold, analyzed; and the pandemic has given new meaning to the idea of 'virtual presence'. Such phenomena are often thought to belong to the era of the 'posthuman', an era that both promises and threatens to redefine the notion of the human: what does it mean to be human? Can technological advances impact the way we define ourselves as a species? What will the future of humankind look like? These questions have gained urgency in recent years, and continue to preoccupy cultural and legal practitioners alike. How can the law respond and adapt to a world shaped by technology and AI? How can it ensure that technological developments remain inclusive, while simultaneously enforcing ethical limits to its reach? The volume explores how fictional texts, whether on the page or on screen, negotiate the legal dilemmas posed by the increasing infiltration of technology into modern life.

This work attempts to counteract the essentialism of originary thinking in the contemporary era by providing a new reading of a relatively understudied corpus of literature from a ambivalently stereotyped diasporic group, in order to rethink and problematise the concept of diaspora as a spatial concept. As work situated in the Law-in-Literature movement, beyond the disciplinary boundaries of scholarship, this book aims to construct a 'literary jurisprudence' of diaspora space, deconstructing space in order to question what it means to be 'settled' in literary refractions of the lawscape by drawing on refractions of case law in a corpus of texts by Romani authors. These texts are used as hermeutic framings to draw unique spatio-temporal landscapes through which the reader can explore the refractive, reflective, interpretative conditions of legality as a crucible in which to theorise law.The radical intent of this work, therefore, is to deconstruct jurisprudential spatial order in order to theorize diaspora space, in the context of the Roma Diaspora. This work will offer readers new possibilities to re-imagine diaspora through law and literature and provides an innovative critical interdisciplinary analysis of the shaping of space.

Every culture has its own monsters, creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge basic notions of self and identity within a given cultural paradigm. This book examines the concept of monstrosity from a number of different perspectives: from monstrosity as a Roman legal violation and experiments in nineteenth-century fiction to modern ideas of monstrosity, linked to trauma, androgyny, postcolonial perspectives, AI and cyborgs.

Diaspora Studies have emerged to study the changing patterns of global migration and home making. This volume offers new perspectives on this highly relevant field of research by integrating both legal and literary aspects, questions and methodologies in the study of diasporas and migration.

Analyses the concept of the "body" in the Renaissance period and its articulations and interpretations both in the legal field and the theatre.

In today's world, the increasing progress in biotechnologies has paved the way for profound challenges to basic notions defining the human existence. This book aims to merge the two fields of bioethics and law through the literary text, by taking into consideration the transformations of the concept of persona at which we have nowadays arrived.

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking human rights seriously has never been more urgent than it is today. This book includes eighteen essays that are written in a spirit of interdisciplinarity, and are intended to make a significant contribution to this vital and enduring debate.

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking human rights seriously has never been more urgent than it is today. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written in a spirit of interdisciplinarity, and are intended to make a signficant contribution to this vital and enduring debate.

Criminals as Animals from Shakespeare to Lombroso demonstrates how animal metaphors have been used to denigrate persons identified as criminal in literature, law, and science. Its three-part history traces the popularization of the 'criminal beast' metaphor in late sixteenth-century England, the troubling of the trope during the long eighteenth century, and the late nineteenth-century discovery of criminal atavism. With chapters on rogue pamphlets, Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Defoe and Swift, Godwin, Dickens, and Lombroso, the book illustrates how ideologically inscribed metaphors foster transfers between law, penal practices, and literature. Criminals as Animals concludes that criminal-animal metaphors continue to negatively influence the treatment of prisoners, suspected terrorists, and the poor even today.

The volume deals with four main themes, each of which is analysed by a scholar with a background in the humanities and a scholar with a legal background (or lawyer), respectively: Law and Humanities;

This volume focuses on the sublime and proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law.It also draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies: Law's disciplinary autonomy has been challenged.

The concept of the just war poses one of the most important ethical questions to date. Can war ever be justified and, if so, how? When is a cause of war proportional to its costs and who must be held responsible? The monograph Just and Unjust Wars in Shakespeare demonstrates that the necessary moral evaluation of these questions is not restricted to the philosophical moral and political discourse. This analysis of Shakespeare's plays, which focuses on the histories, tragedies and Roman plays in chronological order, brings to light that the drama includes an elaborate and complex debate of the ethical issues of warfare. The plays that feature in this analysis range from Henry VI to Coriolanus and they are analysed according to the three Aquinian principles of legitimate authority, just cause and right intention. Also extending the principles of analysis to more modern notions of responsibility, proportionality and the jus in bello-presupposition, this monograph shows that just war theory constitutes a dominant theoretical approach to war in the Shakespearean canon.

This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas to Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today.

The volume "Visualizing Law and Authority. The common theme of the essays consists in an examination of the scopic field and of regimes of visibility in phenomenological terms, arguing that law constitutes a cognitive and aesthetic field of normative world-making.

The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley's famous phrase "e;the legislator of the world"e;, it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.