Volume 8, Issue 2

At the end of Voltaire's Candide (1759), the main character, Candide, settles on a little farm, and his final statement is: “We must cultivate our garden.” In Candide we confront a religious and political disappointment. This double disappointment seems to provoke Candide's and his friends' retreat from the public world of politics to the privacy of the garden. However, things are much more complicated. Voltaire's garden may refer to something else: thus, we have to re-think the meaning of the garden. To do this, the article addresses the following questions: What if Candide's statement provoked by the double disappointment is a demand for a non-metaphysico-theological being-in-the-world? What if something else takes place than a withdrawal into a safe haven of private space? What if the garden is the space of being-together without any theological guarantees and cultivation an attempt to bring justice into this garden?

The English law of property is often described as a “bundle of sticks” in which each “stick” represents a particular right. Gardens challenge these rights and wreak havoc on the “bundle of sticks.” This article looks at the twenty-first century manifestations of community engagement with ground and explores how “gardening” is undermining concepts of ownership, possession and management of land and how the fence between what is private and what is public is being encroached and challenged by community and individual initiatives to cultivate. The garden in this article is therefore a place of questioning and redefining traditional legal concepts, but it also reflects contemporary concerns which go beyond the confines of the garden and the boundaries of the law. At the same time however, the garden represents a continuum between past struggles and ideals and future hopes, and so the cultivators of today are located in a continuing evolution of law, land and people. By considering the various ways in which people are engaging with land outside of the usual private land/person context and their motives for doing so, this article places present gardening in its historic context and analyses the challenges that various forms of gardening pose for established legal principles. In particular this article asks if present gardening demands a re-examination of property law and a re-evaluation of what is understood as “property” if the “bundle of sticks” is unpacked.

Rather than establishing the right to free movement as a fundamental right for all European citizens, the Free Movement Directive has surreptitiously enshrined the sovereign right to dissect and shape concepts of territorial belonging, as can be seen by the legitimizing of calls for restricting categories of desirability, and the delayed and flawed transposition of the directive into domestic immigration law. I will be performing a spatio-legal reading of a literary text in order to consider the implications of the legal right to free movement in the context of the Directive, specifically in relation to the Roma in Europe. This paper will argue that the narrative construction of a garden space serves as an effective metaphor for the attempt to derive agency and embodiment from the traversing of supra-national space, and will consider the role of counter-narrative as potentially deterritorializing or “uprooting” concepts of territorial belonging within the EU. Rather than destabilize national belonging through the cultivation of a heterotopian pluralistic space, complex vertical legalities pruning the garden space emphasize instead a liminal space of boundaries enacted through the Directive, which provide an ambivalent solution to marginalized groups. This spatial reading attempts, therefore, to move towards a temporal – rather than territorial – inter-pretation of the embodiment of space and the right to free movement.

This article explores the issue of discontinuity in relation to historical trauma and law. Drawing on psychoanalytical literature developed around the traumatic status of the Real, it argues that in order to approach authoritarian normative structures a comparative gaze is necessary regardless of the apparent cultural and historical unity of the legal order in which they emerge. In a first part I critically analyse the ontological tenets of the dominant discourse in the field of legal theory and comparative legal studies, one which is founded upon a mythical assertion of oneness as a stable ground for the symbolic construction of the law. I turn then towards psychoanalysis in order to formulate a theoretical framework which would be appropriate in approaching historical otherness as embedded in law. By engaging with the paradoxes engendered by the state of exception and totalitarian legal systems, I aim to provide a reading of historical trauma with reference to the construction of legal meaning.

Attempting to create an image, a figure adequate to the critic's discourse on the law, this paper develops a series of variations on the notion of the critic's love for the law, responding to the comments of Peter Goodrich and Oren Ben-Dor, both of whom criticised critique for not breaking with law, for remaining internal to law. Taking their positions perhaps more literally than intended, Goodrich's “love” is considered as an instance of Freud's analysis of what motivates some men's object choice in love, which is then read allegorically, and Ben-Dor's “anticipation” is considered as a version of the story of Tristan and Iseult, as interpreted by de Rougemont. Both are revealed to be instances of mis-identification, with, however, the critic's delusion redeemed as nobler than that of the spouse, perhaps even a more profound knowledge. The critic loves, the apologetic espouses. The critic's work is not a useless passion.

The essay examines some forms of the actual interaction between the different social actions of the law and the theatre in early modern England. Both the theatrical and the legal practice were divided between the comparative ‘freedom’ of oral performance and the equally comparative stability of written texts. Actors' and lawyers' training made use of written texts and performance styles which show clear resemblance in form and in (collaborative) method. The legal exercises were a mandatory part of the law students' training and were perhaps meant to be used as library material in each of the Inns. The Comedy of Errors , by Shakespeare, first performed at Gray's Inn, inscribed within this synergic and collaborative practice, focuses on the problematic issue of oral promises and written contracts in the rising merchant economy of early modern England.

The paper deals with one of the most fateful legislative events in the history of theatre and drama in Britain, namely the 1737 Licensing Act. In late seventeenth and early eighteenth century the debate on the freedom of artistic (namely, theatrical) expression was fiery in Britain. Public opinion had mixed feelings about such social abuses in the population as drunkenness, gambling, laziness, obscenity, and vagabondage, and civil authorities seemed to be unable to bring forms of social constraints into the legal fields thus prosecuting abuse through law and justice. With the help of some historical documents the paper aims at providing some cue to the study of the social and political processes developing in the decades immediately prior to the Licensing Act introduced in 1737, and its immediate aftermath.

Starting from a general overview of the crisis of authority that marked the early modern period due to the Reformation, this paper explores the strategies of subtextual subversion that characterise Renaissance drama, notably revenge tragedies. With its focus on the representation of power, law and justice in The Revenger's Tragedy , this study analyses the dramatist's ability to communicate on different levels, using theatrical self-reflexivity, figurative language and irony to call into question received notions of authority.

In 1798 Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth published a collection of poems entitled Lyrical Ballads . It is now critically acclaimed to be one of the defining moments in the history of English poetry. In the renowned Preface to the collection, Wordsworth asserted that they were intended to “speak a plainer and more emphatic language,” the “language really used by men.” One of the poems found in the Ballads was entitled The Thorn . Wordsworth later claimed that he wrote it whilst walking the Quantock Hills one wind-battered day. Its subject was child-murder and it purported to tell the story of Martha Ray. Few subjects were better calculated to engage public attention. Infanticide “scares” were frequent in late eighteenth and early nineteenth century England, discussion as to the efficacy or otherwise of infanticide law urgently engaged in parliament, in the press, and in popular literature. The Thorn remains one of the most striking contributions to this latter genre; a poem which was intended to make its readers contemplate rather more deeply the apparent injustices written into the law of child-murder in late eighteenth century England.

The present paper aims at offering a reflection upon the specific link between a genre, the Western, and its literary and visual tradition, a powerful mythopoeic means capable of fostering a normalization of social reality itself. The Western represents the foundation of the law's ability to make order out of chaos. Indeed, Westerns usually feature a solitary dominant hero, whose violent expressions are shown as positive, since violence is used for the elimination of the enemy, the re-establishment of order and the triumph of law. The most relevant legal issue of the Western is to be found in this monopoly of violence, allowed to a single hero by civil society in order to counter an illegal spiral of violence.