Volume 9, Issue 1 -

The doctrine of the two bodies , arising from the political theology of the Middle Ages, plays an essential role through the western political philosophy. The theme runs through many of Shakespeare’s plays. But Shakespeare rarely uses the doctrine in order to legitimise power. What interests him is the theme of the weak king (where there is tension between the two bodies) and the fact that a king cannot with impunity manipulate the symbolic power which underlies this doctrine.

The testamentary will of a deceased person seldom features in Shakespeare’s comedies. What is more common is the performance of a will so stubborn and having such a bearing on the estate of the one subject to it that it may be said to exert a testamentary force. Comedy lies in the possibility of escape from a world of subjection to another’s will into a world of freedom to express a will of one’s own. In many of Shakespeare’s comedies escape takes the form of actual physical flight to a new domain – typically from court to country. The trajectory of this escape is from a hierarchical scheme of social status, to a horizontal plane of communal relations; from a traditional scheme in which property and power is handed down, to a scheme of trade in which they pass horizontally from hand-to-hand contractually. This paper will argue that As You Like It exemplifies comedic correspondence between these worlds of will.

This paper focuses on the creative or de-creative function of names in Romeo and Juliet. The dialectics between name and existence (or non-existence) is constant in the text. Let us consider “What’s in a name?” uttered by Juliet in 2.2; or the repetition of “banished” (3.2) where Romeo declares that death is in that word; or “Art thou a man?” (Friar, 3.3) that expands the meaning of man from legal to illegal entity; or also, and foremost, when Capulet threatens Juliet “I’ll ne’er acknowledge thee” (3.5), thus depriving her of legal personhood. Names can create a human being into a social being or they can deprive him of social existence. In addition to this we have Capulet’s power over Juliet which entails the problem of patria potestas: in his wish to deprive Juliet of the family name he de-creates her as a social being but also prevents her from becoming an independent adult.

This essay discusses the right of confrontation generally by contrasting its fundamental import to Anglo-American legal systems with its more recent rise in significance in Continental European ones, before focusing narrowly upon a particular exception to the right of confrontation called the dying declaration. This essay analyzes a highly unusual intersection of literature and law in which a renowned legal scholar errs in relying upon a passage in imaginative literature as the primary support for his argument for how the dying declaration exception to the hearsay rule should be interpreted and applied.

Othello is one of Shakespeare’s most forensic works; in particular, the trial scene of act 1 becomes the locus for the negotiation of the characters’ identity in the context of Venetian society. Othello and Desdemona attempt at overcoming the gender and ethnic tenets of their time through a self-fashioning of their own identities which then they try to submit for legal recognition. In their speeches they both contravene one of patriarchy’s most powerful symbols, that is, marriage, and its social determination and control. Othello tries to circumvent the threat of interracial marriage by fashioning his own image through the narration of his adventures; he aims at making his inner and outer aspect coincide in order to be included in Venetian society. Desdemona fashions herself as a desiring subject and takes the law into her hands as she repeats the ceremony of the spousal per verba de praesenti , thus indirectly obtaining its official sanctioning. The scene seemingly concludes in Othello and Desdemona’s favour, but it actually acknowledges also Brabantio’s disowning act and renders both characters social outcasts. This will emerge more powerfully in the course of the tragedy but the seeds of their condition can be traced to this opening scene, which concludes itself on ambiguous terms. Like many princely figures in the Shakespearean canon, the Doge does not prove capable of administering the law in emergency situations and seems to subsume the inner social threat in favour of an outer social threat (the Turkish invasion). This attitude on his part undermines also the image of the law, reduced to words and negotiated in virtue of the needs of the republic.

As a rhetorical analysis, this paper considers “voices of power” in the discourse of William H. (“Bill”) Parker, former police chief of Los Angeles from 1950 until 1966. Specifically, it tells the story of a conflict between powerful voices, with Chief Parker on one side of a debate over the rights of the accused and the United States Supreme Court on the other. Three case studies serve as the basis for illustrating the Chief’s rhetorical strategies. In 1954, Parker’s responded to the majority opinion of the U.S. Supreme Court in Irvine v. California in which he wrote a 1954 California Law Review piece titled “Surveillance by Wiretap or Dictograph, Threat or Protection?” and defended his police department against the Court’s criticisms that they had violated Patrick Irvine’s constitutional rights by using wiretapping technology for obtaining evidence. In addition, Parker’s arguments in “The Cahan Decision Made Life Easier for the Criminal” address the California State Supreme Court’s overturning of Charles Cahan’s conviction for illegal gambling on the grounds that police had indeed violated his constitutional rights. In his 1965 speech, “Crime and the Great Society,” Parker articulates his vision for a law-abiding society by characterizing the role of law enforcement and giving his perspective on the rights of the accused. The conclusion of the paper asks readers to consider the effects of these voices on society, especially when a powerful voice demands an audience embrace a particular outlook or vision.

In literary-legal discussions of the subject of “voice” in law the focus is often on the voices of defendants and victims, on the view that for a variety of reasons their voices are the ones most often diminished or even totally “unheard.” On the view that voice and speech are connected and that one’s voice is therefore important for one’s identity, I aim to look in this paper at the judge’s voice in law and literature. While the metaphor “the voice of the law” is traditionally taken to refer to judicial impartiality and/or a formalistic view of law as distant from the actions or disputes it is supposed to govern, I want to take the words literally and, on the view that getting a voice of one’s own as a judge requires more than institutional authority and power, ask questions including, but not limited to: What if the voice of the judge is oppressed or even silenced, e.g. by undue influence of a third party? What if the judge is unable to find the right voice when she experiences cognitive dissonances between her institutional voice and her conscience? What space is the judge allowed in the public sphere to speak her voice on cases pending or on societal developments? What space is the judge allowed to show her emotions inside the courtroom? I hope to illustrate my point with emblemata for further discussion in the form of European Human Rights Court decisions and literary works including Lowell B. Komie’s short story “Ash,” Ernst Wiechert’s novella “The judge,” and Kiran Desai’s novel The Inheritance of Loss .

In Da Ponte’s libretto, the Count of Almaviva called for silence in order to best exercise his institutional authority and pass judgment. Trials have always involved a multitude of voices, and yet a requirement for silence. The trial – in this case the criminal trial – is the most significant instrument of state power and coercion over individuals: according to the specific requirements of those in power, the criminal trial and its individual stages involve at times silence and at times clamour and an adequate mise en scène . This paper examines the relationship between voice and silence in trials.

In True History of the Kelly Gang , Australian novelist Peter Carey presents a postmodern historical novel looking back at the case of the famous bushranger Ned Kelly and presenting an alternative account of his protagonist’s career and ignominious end, challenging the official version of events as well as the authority of the law. Carey thus gives a voice to a silenced subaltern subject and rewrites Australian colonial history in a way that raises questions not only with regard to the issue of what really happened but also with reference to the accessibility of historical truth.

This essay aims at highlighting the particular connection between the choice of suicide, and the voices, both abstract and concrete, of power. In every era the malleable materiality of the dead body finds legitimacy in the peculiar hermeneutics of suicide, in sets of institutions, procedures, and beliefs that identify suicidal deaths and assign them meanings. In the novel The Hours by Michael Cunningham, the whole narration is permeated by a preoccupation with the meaning of death to the living, and particularly to potential suicide victims and people exposed to the experience of death. In Cunningham’s novel, suicide acquires the peculiarities of a meaningful gesture, which could then be interpreted as an expression of personal autonomy and a dissident critique of society. Cunnigham, with postmodern detachment, places suicide at the centre of the arena, shaping it within the complex interplay of political, legal, social, scientific and cultural developments. He underlines the universality and atemporality of the emotional experience, as well as the manifest implications and social communications in suicidal behaviour. The different nuances portrayed by the author regarding this aspect contribute to undermining or at least calling into question the normative conceptions of suicide.

A reading of Bruce Chatwin’s well-known (fictional) travel book The Songlines is the starting point for an analysis of the development of legal rules on Aborigines’ rights to land. Two different, but deeply interrelated, lines of reasoning will be followed: the first one will ponder on the ancient Western principle of Terra Australis as terra incognita : disregarding the Aboriginal knowledge and perception of the territory as a complex net of songs (narrations), the British re-mapped, that is re- invented , the Australian geography in order to rule the continent according to their cultural paradigms. The second one will debate the three legal representations of Australia as terra nullius , as land without property and, after the Mabo (n. 2) decision in 1992, as land of fairness and justice . Celsus’s maxim “ius est ars boni et aequi” will help to understand both the living symbiotic relationship Aboriginal peoples have with the land, and the reason why, prior to the British settlement, Australia had been possibly described as a “land without property”, but also how Aborigines were forced to cope with the Western notion of property through the implementation of the Land Rights Act of 1976, and even through the same enforcement of the native title doctrine and the Native Title Act. The claim to a legitimate power and the actual practice of an expert power are points at issue.

“Representation crisis” is certainly an expression that is too imprecise, clichéd and all-embracing: of little use. However, we have to recognize that the theatrical and literary experiments that shook the classical notion of representation in the twentieth century have been fruitful, not only in the arts, but also in terms of their repercussions in the human sciences. Law is no exception to this. On the contrary, its eminently representative nature benefits from being examined in the mirror of the critical experiments provided by fiction. This is, in a very condensed form, the initial postulate that will underpin our hypothesis, which will consist in showing the usefulness of investigating the notion of representation in law through art and literary theory, as well as through examples drawn from concrete theatrical and fictional works, owing to the light theatre and fiction can shed on the fragile balance, the “representational” razor, on which the law rests.