Volume 14, Issue 2

Within the cross-disciplinary research on “Law, Changes and Technology,” this essay introduces the focus on “Islands and insularity: between law, geography, and fiction.” The intriguing and enthralling topic of “Island-ness” places emphasis on the manifold intersections between law, geographic studies, political power, and the humanities. These intersections reflect several issues, such as territorial localisation, environmental crises, colonial imaginaries, as well as the insular societal contexts in which they are imbricated. The focus delivers both a synthetic view of these questions and opens up further perspectives for reflection. The contributions engage various topics and adopt different approaches. Beyond this richness of inputs, the essays reveal some common characteristics of islands and insularity as objects and subjects of human imagination, social organisation, and scientific reflection. In particular, two main issues of islands and insularity can be identified, i.e. dialectics and metaphor .

The island embodies a new and subversive geopolitical area. All modern juridical systems are the result of a catastrophe emerging from a state of exception: those who reach an island are in fact survivors of a wreckage, be it physical, spiritual, or cultural. These assertions are the basis for the creation of literary islands, themselves the result of a wreckage, exiles, of a separation from a civilization with its own juridical systems, a disruption of a known system, of a catastrophe, whether physical, moral, political or social. The creation of an island invites a re-examination of the old relationships concerning the juridical, the political, and the theological.

This paper explores one aspect of the geo-cultural axis constructing the “between” of England as island-metropole and the colonised islands of the Antillean archipelago: that of the crucial significance of the figuration of “island” in the colonial cultural imaginary of the early modern period. It is suggested that the development of “island” as key topographical trope, signifying sea power as opposed to continental imperialism, was a crucial means through which the metropolitan English curated an image of how colonial expansionism might be given meaning, and be experienced, in such a way as to enhance and enrich, rather than overwhelm and impoverish, England as “small island.” Using material drawn from seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature, the paper traces the emergence of, first, England imaged as island garden-paradise, and then, second, the transposition and translation of “garden-paradise” islands into the tropics. This is framed by two images: the first the late seventeenth-century Paston Treasure , and the second a late eighteenth-century portrait of two young women by David Martin. The first is used to illustrate the need to order and curate images of, and in response to, the ‘colonial’ as an experience of encounter and engagement with “Other” through processes of legitimated and authorised subjectification. The second is deployed to illustrate the extent to which the “insular” English cultural imaginary achieved and sustained an account of the beneficial-colonial overseas project and marginalised, to the point of suppression, the violence of the actual-colonial in/on remote “(small) islands.” The portrait of the two women is then used to project forward in time in order to make visible the continuing strength of the colonial legacy of paradise-islands in the contemporary English cultural imaginary: in particular, in the exotic out-of-world and timeless imagery deployed in tourist brochures. As a final coda, the paper ends with referencing the potential of an-other “between islands”: that of a complex network of inter-Antillean creolisation interrupting and challenging the legacy of the linear and centrifugal metropole-(post-)colonial island axis.

In his novel A Fringe of Leaves (1976), Australian Nobel laureate Patrick White takes up the famous case of the 1836 shipwreck and subsequent survival on an island of Eliza Fraser, a Scottish woman who managed to return to white colonial society after having spent several weeks among a tribe of Aborigines in Queensland. White uses this story for an investigation of human processes of categorization as tools of the construction of notions of identity and alterity in contexts in which social, racial, and gendered otherness collide in the separateness of various insular spaces. In shaping the character of Ellen Roxburgh as Fraser’s fictional equivalent, he chooses a hybrid figure the liminality and the border-crossings of which lend themselves both to an investigation and a critical questioning of strategies of self-constitution dependent on imaginings of negative others. On a more concrete historical level, White thus questions the ideas of race, class, and gender early Australian colonial society was founded on and raises issues that are still of consequence even in the 21st century.

The paper addresses the narrative that qualifies micro and remote islands as lands of freedom, suggesting that they can also be lands of despotism. Philosophers from Plato to Aristotle, to Thomas More, to Montesquieu and Rousseau have claimed that micro polities, preferably insular, represent the ideal society, where everyone is actively engaged in public affairs and pursues common good. Literature has represented islands as lands of freedom, opportunity, challenge, success, adventure, redemption, away from the corruption of Europe. However, in the nineteenth century a new narrative has emerged in fiction, which abandons this idyllic approach: islands as lands of despotism. Islands are interpreted as lawless lands, characterised by rivalries between individuals. Moving from these contrasting suggestions from literature and philosophy, the paper discusses the constitutional arrangements of Commonwealth Caribbean and Pacific micro states, in order to investigate where they stand with respect to the dialectic freedom/despotism.

This paper deals with financial markets as forms of financial systems. For the first time theorised under a Luhmannian paradigm, markets are conceptualised as financial systems informed by four main structures: risk, uncertainty, competition, and financial innovation. According to Frank Knight, risk is a measurable entity and can always be calculated, but uncertainty is unmeasurable. Nonetheless, uncertainty constitutes the main catalyst for money creation processes in modern economies. In other words, it underpins profit rather than undermining it. For this reason, the modern financial actor is destined to fail. It must deal with uncertainty if it wants to make a profit, but at the same time it can experience only uncertainty, due to its unmeasurable nature. This has caused a profound dilemma between ‘uncertainty-aversion’ paradigms and self-regulation approaches. The paper argues for a mixed system of hybrid regulation, on the one hand to save the environments of tax haven islands via more transparent policies to tax those same offshore companies, and on the other to promote a system of co-operation between financial operators and the state. This is the only way to promote auto-regeneration processes for the whole financial system, because the system itself has already been programmed to fail, and systemic failures produce contagious effects, showing a deeper interconnection of financial systems tout court as well suggesting a cure via a spontaneous mechanism of auto-regeneration, or autopoiesis.

This contribution provides, in a condensed form, the argument on the topic of interdisciplinarity within Law and the Humanities of my recent book Judging from Experience. Law, Praxis, Humanities . It also engages with recent proposals for the future, both in Law and Humanities and as far as the humanities in themselves are concerned. Its main point is that any “Law and” field that remains theoretical and does not seek to inform legal practice will suffer from a lack of impact of the kind university administrators demand from academic researchers. If interdisciplinary fields are to thrive, they need to provide nourishment to the legal professional by combining the findings of academic theory (including but not limited to legal doctrine) with the specifics of doing law.

This article discusses the tension between the legal framework of copyright and the moral obligation, as framed in Holocaust studies, to remember the atrocities of the Nazi murder of European Jewry. Starting with the case study of a recent award-winning film, The Lady in Number 6 , the essay takes the movie’s difficult availability as an occasion to reflect upon the need to access and distribute this film, even if this creates conflicts with copyright laws, situating this discussion in the larger discussion about law and literature.

Current Western constitutional systems, for quite a few practical reasons, seem to be a sick body that deserves and needs a soft euthanasia, rather than useless palliative care. On the one hand, the words ‘election’ and ‘democracy’ are currently considered synonymous: yet, when the supporters of the American and French revolutions proposed the technique of representation as a means to implement ‘the will of the people,’ there were no parties, no statutes concerning universal franchise, no mass-media, and no Internet. On the other hand, classical Athens has taught us that democracy is more than voting and something different from representation. This contribution argues that merging the radical ideas flourished in the past with the digital culture embedded in the present shall help wipe out the contemporary crisis under the banner of a new e-δημοκρατία.

The present article undertakes an interdisciplinary inquiry into contemporary British verbatim theatre as a site of interplay between law, art and politics. Focusing on the example of Matt Woodhead and Richard Norton-Taylor’s 2016 play Chilcot , documenting the public inquiry into the UK’s role in the 2003 Iraq war, the authors explore the work as a space of legal and political critique, and ask how the specific theatrical and narrative affordances of the verbatim form shape its critical substance.