Volume 12, Issue 2 -

The essay deals with the topic of “border” in the light of the conceptual and etymological link between ideas of Law and Line. Starting from the mythological origins of Rome, passing through Kafka and Shakespeare, Defoe and Dostoyevsky, both the multiform and ancestral need of drawing juridical lines and the consequences of their overcoming are highlighted. The line, seen as both a territorial and a metaphorical border, as a boundary between “what is mine” from “what is yours,” as a separation between what is allowed and what is not, is described as a well-marked sign, reminding Kandinsky’s paintings, but also as a concept sometimes indeterminate, especially when we consider certain “foggy issues” of the contemporary times, such as the proprietary relationship between a person and its body.

Half of a Yellow Sun is a novel written by the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. The title of the book takes its reference from the flag of the former, short-lived, Republic of Biafra, which consisted of a horizontal tricolour of red, black, and green, with a golden rising sun over a golden bar. The author unfolds to the reader the impact and the ugliness of the Biafran war of independence as it meanders through the lives of the interdependent main characters: Ugwu, Olanna, Kainene, Odenigbo and Richard. The events that climaxed into the civil war gradually tore apart the day-to-day routine serenity of the main characters, requiring continuous adjustment in the lives of each character to the reality of war. The harrowing experience of the war drastically changed their lives. The present contribution draws inspiration from thes novel to engage with the construction and definition of social, political and legal boundaries in post-colonial Nigeria, focussing in particular on the relevance and impact of international law norms and principles in the events that unfolded between 1967 and 1970.

This article considers the status of same-sex couples whose lawful marriage in one jurisdiction may not be recognized in another, or who may face discrimination and criminal penalties for their sexual orientation. The article surveys positive developments that promote equality for sexual minorities rather than their punishment. The degree of positive change varies across countries. While traveling across borders, sexual minorities are often subjected to strange dislocations in time and space: they can accelerate through centuries of struggle to find freedom in foreign lands, or they can be hurled back into the darkness of the closet or, worse, detained in a prison cell. The article also focuses on some of the positive developments – legal and otherwise – that have led to the growth of a gay tourist industry; some of the problems that gay travelers may potentially encounter when crossing into countries where the legal rights of sexual minorities are not safeguarded; and some potential “solutions” that will allow gay travelers to engage in cross-border travel without feeling that they are being forced back into the limiting borders of the closet’s confines.

This essay examines how Walter Pater’s work “Sebastian van Storck” ( Imaginary Portraits ) could provide for a new re-reading of Pater’s queerness from a de-constructivist viewpoint which investigates the borders of identity from an anti-social perspective. As a juxtaposition to 1970s theory of sexuality, the anti-social take involves a withdrawal of the homosexual from society, and a subsequent tendency to create a twofold separation: one from without, and one -more subtle- from within. The former entails a rupture between the homosexual Self and the heteronormative Other, the latter is an ontological division between the queer I and its internal culturally heteronormalised counterpart, to be viewed as yet another attempt of the fin-de-siècle complex Self to reach a compromise in a liminal time that could no longer be considered fully Victorian.

The essay deals with the many boundaries set and exceeded by Roman Law when human corporeality is involved. In particular, the focus is on the strict correlation between body expression and socio-juridical marginalization, clearly visible in the case of prostitution in ancient Rome, but also in acting and in fighting in the arenas, activities sharing the same goal as prostitution: they were designed to bring pleasure to the senses. These forms of marginalization differ from the inexorable limit, already decrypted by Roman Law, set by humankindʼs bodily nature to the action of Law: Law is not in the position to “have the last word” on matters concerning human life, on which nature alone can “lay down Law.”

From its very inception modern “law and literature” scholarship has exhibited at least as much interest in what happens in the classroom as it has in what happens in the courtroom. Its principal ambition is educative, its primary audience student. In a strategic sense it hopes that the deployment of literary texts might enhance a law student’s appreciation of the human dimension of legal practice. The first part of this article will set the jurisprudential context, taking a closer look at the evolving legal regulation of “revenge porn,” as well as the critical debate which this regulation has stimulated. The second will then consider the dramatic presentation of the same issues and arguments in Placey’s play. According to Placey, any “time we write a script, we’re hoping in some way people will listen, that our words might have an effect, that they might shake people.” Evan Placey in “Sexting in Parliament: insights from the writer and director of Girls Like That,” in The Play Ground , March 24, 2014, available at: http://nickhernbooksblog.com/category/nhb-author/evan-placey (last accessed February 2, 2017). The final part will contemplate the extent to which this aspiration is realised in Girls Like That .

The UK copyright law regime presents the right to adapt as the sole, authoritative instrument in matters of legitimising translation; a legal “Big Other” conferring an otherwise unreal objective commodity status on what are instead always only ever individual and subjective acts of translation. Drawing primarily on the work of Theo Hermans, and the experiences of poet Jack Underwood in unsuccessfully attempting to formally translate poems by Mascha Kaléko, this article argues for (a) the development and (at the very least) implicit recognition of deviationist and subversive translative replies within – or at the very least alongside – the traditional UK legal schema and (b) a softening of the UK right to adapt by application of the integrity moral right to translations. In addition, a deeper quasi-Ungerian notion of institutional change that accommodates both principles (e. g. legitimate translations can, of course, be argued to exist, to which copyright accords) and counterprinciples (there are also, however, in the long term only multiple acts of translation, some preferred and commoditized, some existing outside that sphere, less functional and more creative/expressive but no less important and not to be prevented for those reasons) can also be advanced. Finally, a much broader critical point regarding the nature and role (or non-role) of law in the context of creative practices more generally can also be presented.

The mythology of modernity is arguably premised on a double gesture of emergence from chaos. The modern subject, self-posited, constructs the world of “order” by acting as the demiurge that brings the “civilized” world into existence. At the same time he negates the chaotic materiality of nature (including the body). This mythology is an exclusionary one. All modes of possessions escaping the abstract simplicity of the modern binary of public (sovereignty) and private (property), are ideologically and materially expunged from the parameters of common sense. This article will suggest however, that chaos operates also under a different semantic configuration, namely that which is directly linked to the corporeal, unbiddable complexity of social practices. In this alternate sense, which dis-articulates the linear narrative of modern emancipation, chaos is far from a primordial, disordered state of nature in need of either a self-positing subject or a policing Leviathan. The complexity of these social practices always already contains a plurality of arrangements, which are chaotic, yet, not disordered. From the perspective of liberal and neo-liberal hegemonic legalities, these chaotic practices remain “monstrous” and a “threat to the public order,” feared as a resurgence of that corporeal materiality the modern subject has striven to forget; from the perspective of the commons however, they are resisting strategies traversing liberal modernity, and may be understood, with Foucault, as (legal) insurrections.

In Shakespeare’s comedy The Merchant of Venice , Tubal’s chief function seems to be to furnish cash for Shylock’s loan to Antonio. However, I argue that when Shylock approaches Tubal for money, Tubal does not confront Shylock but vows instead to establish conditions by which to convict the moneylender of intent to harm Antonio. For this to work, Tubal needs the connivance of the Duke, which gainsays one component of the myth of Venice that holds that the city-state’s legal system is above reproach.

Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959) was a Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the term genocide and worked tirelessly for its codification in the United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide as a crime under international law. Most of his writings on genocide were published around fifty years posthumously as the core of the field of genocide studies that emerged in the 1990s. Bearing the sense of inseparability of Lemkin the author and his writings, this article concerns the death-of-the-author postulate amid the origin myth that surrounds him. It engages in his strategies for resisting his death as an author and with the multiple professional, political, and social languages that probe and transgress their respective genres. While genocide studies now seem to reluctantly critique Lemkin’s ideas, they nevertheless remain captivated by Lemkin the author and seem to be affected by his passion, multiple voices, languages, and genres. In this they tread in his footsteps in both form and content.

This paper intends to be a legal-philosophical approach to the film The Danish Girl , which tells the story of the first person to undergo a sex change surgery. However, the paper does not attempt to address the preeminent question in the movie, concerning gender issues. Our proposal comes from the hypothesis of art as the best conceivable place for the invention of an “other” that comes. The reflections brought about by the film point to the very heart of the Law and Humanities movement, since it shows how otherness may precede any conceptual dimension, as well as the important question concerning the possibility (or necessity?) of transformation of Law through art. Therefore, we will try to show how the idea of literature, based on Derrida’s concept, Jacques Derrida, Positions (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2001). could indicate a possible ethical path to implement the confluence between legal and artistic narratives, presenting itself as a fertile soil for the opening to the otherness that comes, towards the transformation of the very idea of justice.