Volume 6, Issue 1

In this article I will continue my exploration of the relevance of the humanities for the notion of practical wisdom, phronèsis , in legal theory and legal practice. In doing so I aim to return to James Boyd White’s metaphor for law, justice as translation, central to which is the acknowledgement of, on the one hand, the necessity of a process of mediation between languages and between people, and, on the other hand, the impossibility of total correspondence. The idea of translation is also interesting from a methodological point of view with respect to interdisciplinary ventures such as Law and Literature, especially given its movement in the direction of the broader field of Law and Humanities and/or Law and Culture. If law is like language in the definition of W. G. Sebald’s protagonist Jacques Austerlitz and “may be regarded as an old city full of streets and squares, nooks and crannies, with some quarters dating from far back in time while others have been torn down, cleaned up and rebuilt, and with suburbs reaching further and further into the surrounding country,” what then are the cross-roads, the possibilities for the new directions that Law and Literature may take if we start from a distinctly European perspective with its particular local legal and literary narratives?

Among the many visual images we use for the law the garden is an outstanding one. The topos of the garden has a wide semantic range: it is the eternal metaphor of life and it is an ethical image indicating the active behavioral rules man has to follow. The myth of the garden arises connected to a structural system put at man’s disposal, however a system which entails limits and limitations. The action of shaping nature is connected with a sort of violence imposed on nature: the garden becomes man’s grand scenario where man challenges God in his ambition to modify and regulate nature. In the case of both garden and law a creation according to certain rules is implied and these rules must be respected unless the garden and the juridical system wither and die. I here explore the relationship between the concept of garden/landscape through which law is conceived and from which it draws meaning.

Metaphor is not merely a sub-set of rhetorical language, but language may be regarded as a sub-set of metaphor and all our ways of acquiring real meaning, language included, may be considered to be essentially metaphorical. Abstract reality is unknowable or knowable; meaningless or meaningful. If it is knowable and meaningful, it is only knowable and meaningful in a metaphorical sense. The argument that reality is metaphorical can be expressed as an argument that reality is our name for abstract reality as we perceive it and this is similar to Bertrand Russell’s argument that any object that we touch is not reliably real, but is merely a notion of an object inferred from what we know through our senses. It is because the gap between the thinker and the thing is in a certain sense “real” that we can say that the metaphorical bridge (and metaphor as bridge) which traverses the conceptual or cognitive gap is itself as concretely real as any thing.

Peter Ackroyd’s Dan Leno and the Limehouse Golem (1994) highlights juridical issues such as the normative function of law and the punishment of crime, and intertwines them with the emergence of the unconscious of the law itself as well as of the individual. This aspect is analyzed in particular through the concept of the performance of individual identity (theatrical and social) in the context of late-nineteenth-century London music halls, and extends itself to include the awareness of man’s dual personality and the emergence of the double within the tenets of detective fiction.

The aim of this article is to reflect upon Jeanne Hersch’s essay, Les droits de l’homme d’un point de vue philosophique (1990). This short essay constitutes a fundamental reference point on the nature and value of the concept of human rights. The starting point concerns an apparent consensus on the idea of “human rights”: formally everybody agrees on the existence of human rights and on the necessity of respecting them. Nevertheless, once the concept is further developed, doubts and inconsistencies arise. A possible explanation of this phenomenon is that the idea of human rights per se is universal, because it brings all human beings together; on the other hand, human beings live their lives within a particular context and this often changes the meaning and content given to human rights. What is shared by all people everywhere is the need to affirm one’s freedom, notwithstanding differences of meaning or content. An explanation of this principle may be found in the new idea of the categorization of rights proposed by Jeanne Hersch: these rights have been acknowledged and proclaimed in diverse historical moments, but the real difference among them is the needs they must satisfy. The purpose of the present article is to attempt to combine Hersch’s reflections with the contemporary idea of constitutional fundamental rights and, in particular, with the significance of the right to life and the right to health.

This paper examines the development of the concept of women’s reproductive rights in human rights treaties and conventions since the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights , revealing how traditional human rights formulations are often male-centered and lack a gender-sensitive approach. Since feminist speculative fiction has anticipated many of the reproductive rights issues that we are facing today, the author claims that literary texts such as Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), P. D. James’s The Children of Men (1992) and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007) can enlighten contemporary debates on reproductive rights and contribute to the development of a universal ethics of human rights that takes into account the specificity of women’s rights.