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Literature and the Legal Imaginary: Knowing Justice

Edited by Subha Mukherji · Dunstan Roberts
Palgrave Macmillan January 2025

Specifications

ISBN-13
9783031740923
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Publication
January 2025
Format
Hardback
Jurisdiction
Switzerland ? Countri(es) for reference only

Details

Tuning into the collective understanding of law as lived experience, Literature and the Legal Imaginary: Knowing Justice is a timely and distinctive intervention in the field of law and literature. It seeks to understand and inhabit the intersection between judicial procedure, legal thinking and imaginative practice, where epistemic processes that elude the formal discourses of law and legal history are generated and brought into view.

But the law in early modern England - the focus of this book though not its horizon - was also an imaginative resource and a repository of structures of feeling. These are functions uniquely grasped through literary mediation because literature shares the representational modes and structures of law but not its methods or ends. Bringing together established and younger scholars from literary studies, legal history, theology and law, and employing a variety of approaches, this collection of essays eschews flat description in favour of layered analysis, cognisant of the plurality of concept, practice and representation. In using a literary lens, it treats apparent binaries or distinct registers as interlinked constituents of an ecology, and navigates the gap between abstract jurisprudence and the affective, composite, social event of justice or judgment. Its perception of 'literature', likewise, is capacious: including imaginative method, literary strategies used by law and its cognate disciplines, and hermeneutic and critical methods that are traditionally regarded as literary. Its notion of epistemology, meanwhile, encompasses not simply the condition of judicial knowledge but also its process, psychology and ethics: it attempts to know justice at the same time as it attends to what justice knows, fails to know, or resists knowing.

Table of Contents

Part I - Introduction
Chapter 1 - Subha Mukherji: Introduction

Part II - Legal Imaginaries
Chapter 2 - Julie Stone Peters: 'Behind Justice's Book and Sword: Knowledge, Emotion, and Judgement in the Scene of Law'
Chapter 3 - Doyeeta Majumdar: 'Law of Nature in Inns of Court Drama'
Chapter 4 - Richard Sherwin: 'Escalus' Dream: Reimagining Shakespeare's States'

Part III - Text, Knowledge, Hermeneutics
Chapter 5 - Regina Schwartz: 'The letter and the Spirit: Portia's Case'
Chapter 6 - Torrance Kirby: 'Configuring God as Law: Richard Hooker's Poetics of Law'
Chapter 7 - Charles McNamara: 'The Common Consent of Words: An Aristotelian Element of Hobbesian Legal Rhetoric'

Part IV - Play and Pleasure
Chapter 8 - Peter Goodrich: 'Doublings: Comedy, Office, Law'
Chapter 9 - Maksymilian Del Mar: 'Ludic Legal Pedagogy: Mooting in Early Modern England'
Chapter 10 - Gary Watt: '"A delightful measure": Imagining Barfield's Poetic Jurisdiction'

Part V - Law and Poetics
Chapter 11 - Conrad van Dijk: 'Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan and the allegory of law'
Chapter 12 - Valerie Hayaert: 'The versification of legal codes'
Chapter 13 - Jan Melissa-Schramm: 'Towards a Poetics of Equality in Nineteenth-Century English Literature'
Chapter 14 - Alex Feldman: 'The Beatitude of the Berrigans: Jurisprudential Drama

Part VI - Afterword
Chapter 15 - Kathy Eden: Afterword
Index
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