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Anthony’s Trollope’s short novel The Warden provides a rich and sophisticated case study in a wide range of equity jurisdictions. Some characters in the novel advance the notion that justice requires people to fulfil the duties of, and receive the benefits of, their ordained place in the social scheme. This notion has traditionally carried the name of equity when it refers, for example, to the divinely sanctioned, true succession of monarchs. Other parties in The Warden advance a notion that sometimes goes by the name of equity, but which is really a concern for social equality and distributive justice; it is a notion that often calls for received order to be disputed, disrupted and reformed. In The Warden , we also find equity understood as a legal right to wealth, or rather as a Chancery right to wealth which is based upon equitable notions of substantial justice rather than legal notions of formal entitlement. The titular character of the novel, Mr Septimus Harding, the warden of Hiram’s Hospital, searches, in the midst of all these arguments, for a “true equity” such “that he might sleep at night without pangs of conscience.” In this article, I argue that the “true equity” that Mr Harding seeks (and the equity that he demonstrates in the very act of seeking) is close to what Aristotle had in mind when he set out his idea of epieikeia in the Nicomachean Ethics , because it conceives equity to be an individual ethical response to the demands of a particular factual context. “True equity” is not an institutional jurisdiction; it is a quality of personal character.

This paper argues for a re-evaluation of the manner in which conscience is used by equity lawyers. Debates by early modern humanists sought an alignment between conscience and public office. Indeed, conscience had very little to do with the private morals or private compunction of the Chancellor. Rather, conscience was implicated at the level of duty, honestas and dignity. It required stricter attention to the metaphysics of public official conduct. In these terms, conscience was a humanist re-evaluation of a classical idea that gave heavier emphasis to the poesis of vision.

The essay aims to prospect an original understanding of Equity Jurisdiction at the intersection of Law, Literature and Theology, theoretically based on a critical reassessment of E. Kantorowicz’s and E.L. Santner’s arguments. In this perspective, the Author uncovers the tensional metamorphoses, which ontologically affected and transmuted Equity from Medieval foundations to Renaissance reformed settlement, in order to fulfil a process of mystical secularization. Moving from a deeper appreciation of Chancellor’s figure and institutional role, the new intellectual vision here proposed brings to the light the historical and symbolical relevance of the Chancellor’s two bodies, which mimically reflected the dualities embedded in the normative figure of the King. The main purpose is to demonstrate how Equity Jurisdiction was charged with an eschatological significance and was attracted into millenaristic visions and narratives. Equity definitely constituted the salvific seam between Theological Order and Legal Faith. Meaningful arguments, in order to support the main thesis, comes from Medieval Literature, and especially from the spectacularized allegorical representation enacted by verses of Piers Plowman, where the contending claims of Common Law and Equity are christologically reinterpreted. Other foundative elements emerge from the valorization of the connection between Equity’s strategies and Elizabethan Apocalypticism. The Equity jurisdiction was a powerful device in order to gives voice and expression to the katechontic mission embodied by Queen Elizabeth I. The bond between Sovereignty and Equity was newly attracted into an eschatological plan.

How can equity (in relation to common law) be thought or rather imaged? Drawing on Serres’s topographical account of time, it is suggested that equity carries (and contributes to law) accounts of time beyond the lineal timeframe familiar to common law, thereby enriching not only the temporal but also the spatial reach of law, a fundamental contribution to the development of sophisticated legal designs for property and commercial law serving early capital. The argument is traced in (teased out from) a Deleuzean use of image to diagram potentials for new engagements with thinking and practicing equity, a celebration of the role of the artisan (here as baker).

This paper focuses on the “grave” in the scholarship of Frederic William Maitland. It focuses on Maitland’s later life, his relation to biographical writing and to his series of lectures published posthumously in 1909 as Equity also the Forms of Action at Common Law . The paper explores the theme of burial in Maitland’s lectures and draws some observations about the life of historical legal scholarship and the vocation of the modern jurist. Faced with the task of recouping a jurisprudence from the shifting sands of a system of positive law subject to constant mechanistic reform, Maitland remains attentive to the burial of law and to the peculiar life of its artifices and innovation.

My starting point is that bioethics and the problems connected to human rights and human dignity are the logical evolution of the principles of equity. My paper aims at analysing Jodi Picoult’s novel My Sister’s Keeper (2005) in the light of the connections existing between Literature and the interdisciplinary fields of Bioethics and Biolaw. Bioethics examines the moral and ethical dimension of biological sciences, with particular reference to health-related contexts, whereas biolaw takes into account their more and more evident legal implications. Picoult’s literary production is chiefly devoted to inspect how modern technology applied to medicine has affected our lives, bringing on evident threats to the consistency of our rights and undermining our interpersonal relationships as well. Throughout this compelling novel, life, love and compassion, science and the law indissolubly merge together. The extremely complicated context of boundary medical situations the author presents force us to open our eyes to alarming current scenarios, and to their future possible developments as well. Her fictional characters call for a reassessment of the concept of human dignity and for the necessity for law to defend the integrity of the body.

This essay aims to provide a dual reading of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman : a literary one, centred on the multifarious references to famous works by authors such as Sterne, Gide, Dostoevsky and Kafka, and a linguistic one, in which the intertextual game is sought in the language of legal texts, particularly those belonging to the Irish tradition. While Patrizia Nerozzi explores the interplay with literary genres, motifs and narrative patterns, Mara Logaldo’s analysis identifies wordplays and other recurring rhetorical strategies, focusing on the typical traits of Irish and Legal English. Both studies concentrate on the parody of law that permeates the text: while the literary reading highlights the complex declinations of nonsense within this novel vis-à-vis other literary texts, the linguistic analysis shows to what extent Flann O’Brien exploits the idiosyncrasies of legal language to build up, with words, his architecture of absurdity, his fable of law.