Volume 8, Issue 1

In Austen's novels, the social, economic and legal culture of her times reverberates in a continuous interplay between text and context. The contemporary law of inheritance plays a central role in her heroines' stories, establishing that connection between state and estate which marks their destiny, transforming what seems objective and general into a subjective and personal experience.

Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White addresses the question of the representation of women as legal subjects and demonstrates the author's deep awareness of current legal debates in this field. In the Victorian period the concept of personhood was strictly connected with property, which was also a prerequisite for social power. Within this context, the novel takes into consideration a series of interrelated issues such as property and inheritance laws, the Victorian conception of marriage, and the bureaucratization of identity from the point of view of the female subject. Collins's female characters seem to conform to Victorian tenets but actually oppose them from within by giving voice to alternative legal world views.

Law and culture constitute a single interrelated entity, a basis on which our society is built, and together they provide the social rules we need to profitably interact with other human beings. In Iain M. Banks's novel The Player of Games law and culture incessantly intermingle; on one hand, the Culture's cultural rules seem to embody the best solution for a multicultural society, on the other hand the Empire of Azad's hierarchical structure strongly relies on fixed and immutable laws. What happens when these highly different systems of rules clash against each other?

In contemporary debates about the pros and cons of digital humanities (DH), there are certain interesting echoes of the famous ``two cultures debate'' – the one started by C.P. Snow in a lecture at the University of Cambridge in 1959, and followed up by another Cambridge lecture in 1962 by F.R. Leavis. Persons with a background in the arts had, Snow argued, a negative attitude toward the natural/technological sciences which made them unwilling to believe in the good of scientific and technological progress. Countering Snow's lecture, F.R. Leavis claimed that Snow's technological enthusiasm left no room for the more contemplative values that characterize the humanities. The ``two cultures'' debate has been with us ever since. In its current form, the ``two cultures'' controversy concerns relations between digital media and changing cultural interactions. Making it possible to bridge the gap between the ``two cultures'' by integrating quantitative methods into core humanities research, the new media influence both intellectual frameworks for humanities scholarship, and practices of translation, interpretation and mediatisation in relation to cultural encounters. In this article, I hope, by means of revisiting this old debate, to clarify some of the underlying issues.

The article examines the concept of ``cultural exception'' through the lenses of the two constitutive parts of the law-and-literature movement. In particular, it highlights the inadequacy of traditional legal categories for governing contemporary multicultural societies. By focusing on the meaning of the term ``cultural exception,'' it stresses of the necessity of new keys for interpreting legal phenomena. In contemporary pluralistic multicultural society, constitutional law requires new concepts whilst managing differences, or regulating the relations between authority and society that underpin different constitutional approaches. The law of differences, however, shows many important links with literature: both the understanding of equality and the literary production are deeply influenced by society evolution; both law and literature are expressed through language; and legal language is an instrument of de-codification of social reality.

This essay aims at highlighting the different cultural and metaphorical outcomes introduced by the vampire as created by Bram Stoker and by postmodern re-readings of the vampire, with a particular focus on the novels The Southern Vampire Mysteries and the American Tv series True Blood which is the transposition of the novels. The preliminary statement of this essay is that the law is a recurrent theme within Gothic literature; the figure of the vampire (canonized by Bram Stoker's Dracula ) metonymically stands for the uncertainty of a foreign legal system as opposed to the rationality of the English legal system. Moving to the postmodern age, I will analyse the contemporary manifestation of the Gothic imagination, by focusing on the figure of the vampire, within the context of an encounter with poststructuralist theory and the politics of postmodernity. If Dracula is, from a legal and a social viewpoint, a bounded and controlled entity and identity because he is the only one of his species and, as such, has no other options but to adapt to society itself, in the contemporary rereading of the vampire offered by The Southern Vampire Mysteries and True Blood , the vampire epitomizes the dialogue and relation between cultural diversities. The novels and the Tv series, in becoming a metaphorical reflection on issues linked to multiculturalism, help us reconfigure and redevelop problems of multiculturalism in order to suit changing conditions and create an overarching set of rules and regulations that are free from the disadvantages of one-sidedness or arbitrariness. The undertaking of elaborating normative recommendations capable of transcending the barriers of culture, race and religion seems to be full of intellectual, political and legal dangers, since it could be problematic to use conceptual frameworks created by one culture (human culture) to describe and evaluate the reality of another (vampiric culture).

To the contemporary jurist it may seem quite nonsensical to describe law as a not-exclusively textual but also iconic phenomenon. The idea that there is some form of ``normativity of the image'' relevant to the theory of law would certainly appear unfounded. The difference between the rational normativity of the text and the mythical irrationality of the image and the symbol appears however to be clearly set out in the difference between Kelsens's and Schmitt's theories. The paper proposes an aesthetic of law intended to recompose the unity of the problem of law, placing it anthropologically between the rational and the irrational, between the normative text and the symbolic mythology of its basis, reconstructing the common root of these two theories in Hobbes' thought. Following the formulation of the legal canonist and philosopher Pierre Legendre, law is not a rational systema iuris composed only of rationally interpretable norms, but also and always a corpus iuris wrapped in images, symbols and myths, and which upholds the norm aesthetically and dogmatically, makes it presentable, credible and anthropologically communicable, and considers the ``legal liturgies'' as an aesthetic foundation of the ``third'' in contemporary theories of law.

In Henry Adam's riveting third-person autobiography posthumously published ( The Education of Henry Adams , 1918) the concept of law is scrutinized in all its possible meanings. The moral law, the law of politics, the law of economics, the natural law, etc. are all regarded – however tentatively – as closely interconnected ways of organizing experience which may throw light both on universal issues and on historically determined, distinct features of American culture and society. Adams also explored therein the strict juridical meanings of Law. Notwithstanding his recurring paraleptic claims to ignorance on the subject, ``outlawry,'' and ``accidental education'' acquired through direct experience rather than on law books, Adams was actually a learned and fine analyst who constantly attempted ``to bring the case within a general law.'' Covering the period between 1838 and 1905, however, he presented the Law as a principle which, along with the ``democratic dogma'' instilled to him by his father and grandfather, was rapidly decaying, due to the abrupt changes brought about by the Civil War and, more generally, by the ground-breaking scientific and technological discoveries of the time. What Adams ultimately derives from experience is that ``the law altogether, as path of education, vanished in April 1861, leaving a million young men planted in the mud of a lawless world'' while struggling to catch up with the multiplicity and anarchy of the modern multiverse.

The essay diachronically compares some declarations of man's rights such as Tom Paine's Rights of Man , the French Declaration des Droits de l'Homme et du Citoyen (1789) and, much later and after World War II, the Charter of the United Nations (1945) and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) in order to understand how the concept of ``human rights'' has evolved across time. The triumph of human rights is rooted in paradox and in their principles' patent violations during the age of the Holocaust. One of the most horrible consequences of the violation of human rights in that period consisted in the survivors' being doomed to silence for more than twenty years. The survivors' words had to confront the resistance of language to represent what sounded as unrepresentable and the people's refusal to listen: they were deprived even of the right to speak. The problem of authenticity and inauthenticity is called into question, recalling Geoffrey Hartman's Scars of the Spirit . From this perspective, the paper examines John Boyne's The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas (2006), Binjamin Wilkomirski's Fragments (1996) and William Styron's Sophie's Choice (1982), thus centring its focus on children's rights.

Indeterminacy is an apparently unavoidable aspect of legal language and this paper aims to offer a taxonomical review of concepts related to linguistic and legal indeterminacy, with particular reference to the phenomenon of vagueness. Starting from the consideration that the notion of legal vagueness is itself intrinsically vague and extremely multifaceted, this study describes the main functions of vagueness and its connection with related phenomena such as ambiguity, contestability, and fuzziness. More specifically, the focus is on legislative texts, and illustrative examples are taken from the EU Directive 2011/92 on the assessment of the effects of certain public and private projects on the environment. Vagueness is here seen as an inherent feature of legal language rather than a threat to the rule of law. The paper illustrates the rationales behind different forms of legal and linguistic indeterminacy and, in particular, offers considerations on how vague choices may be exploited to shape normative texts.