Edinburgh Critical Studies in Law, Literature and the Humanities

Examines the significance of the Faustian pact in international criminal law

• The work is a fresh ‘take’ not only on critical legal theory or law-and-literature but, rather, a powerful and cutting-edge fusion of the two: a critico-cultural legal study
• The book’s readings of drama, prose fiction and lyric, are always contextualised in terms of law, broadly construed - in terms of doctrine, policy and jurisprudence – that demonstrate not only a deep understanding of, but a bold deconstruction of the claims to a ‘higher good’ of, for example, the international criminal courts, the law of the sea, human rights law, humanitarian law, and contemporary sovereignty
• Further, these readings are tied together by the ‘golden thread’ of critical theory running throughout and turning, in particular, on the work of Agamben, Schmitt, and Kantorowicz, all mobilised to navigate and negotiate the relationship between law and the aesthetic

The book provides an original and captivating perspective on international law and Giorgio Agamben’s work. The manuscript is profoundly aesthetic-textual in its approach, as exemplified in its deft and insightful close readings of drama (Goethe’s Faust), prose fiction (Melville’s Bartleby and Benito Cereno) and lyric, be it devotional (Laudes Regiae, Handel, ‘The Lord is a Man of War’) or otherwise (Edwin Starr’s ‘War’, Boy George’s ‘War Song’). Attentive to language, plot, theme and characterisation, these readings not only read the texts in question, but they also read them anew, yielding fresh, innovative, and unique cultural legal interpretations.

The first study of the representation of corporations in US law, literature, and culture

• Covers key topics in company law including the emergence of corporate personhood, the regulation of monopolies, the piercing of the corporate veil, agent-principal relationships and examines their literary and cultural manifestations
• Presents interdisciplinary readings of legal, literary and visual texts, including legal treatises, caricatures, novels, and magazine publications
• Draws on literary texts including Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton’s The Squatter and the Don, James Fenimore Cooper’s The Bravo, Frank Norris’ The Octopus and Charles W. Chesnutt’s The Partners
• Draws on cases including Charles River Bridge v. Warren Bridge (1837), Munn v. The State of Illinois (1877) and Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (1886)

This book examines the way the corporation – a legal concept of enduring and timely importance in the Anglo-American legal tradition – was imagined in the nineteenth century historical imagination.

Stefanie Mueller traces the ways in which literary and cultural representations of the corporation in nineteenth-century America helped shift how the corporation was envisioned; from a public tool meant to serve the common good, to an instrument of private enterprise. She explores how artists and writers together with lawyers and economists represented this transformation through narrative and metaphor. Drawing on a range of legal, literary and visual texts, she shows how the corporation’s public origins as well as its fundamentally collective nature continued to be relevant much longer than previous scholarship has argued.

Views the ‘lawful forest’ as both a material forest of trees, and a metaphor for a more relational understanding of law, property and place

• Undertakes a wide-ranging exploration of our diverse relationships with land that brings together critical property theory and legal geography
• Explores spatial justice, Indigenous perspectives, and the intersecting discourses of property and human rights
• Draws on the literature of critical common law property, legal geography, the radical commons, legal custom, protest and the forest
• Includes line drawings at the beginning of each chapter that evoke the imagery of the forest to create thematic links between each section

This book is a study of the critical history of space, and the ways in which a dominant property ideology has entrenched an exclusionary and profoundly alienating version of spatial ordering. It focuses on select periods in time, when the seemingly linear trajectory of enclosure momentarily wavers and alternate spatial paths briefly materialise, before ‘disappearing’ from plain sight. Using the forest as a thematic device, Cristy Clark and John Page explore the tensions that pervade our propertied relationships: between commodity and community, abstraction and context, and private enclosure and the public square.

The book draws on a range of case studies including the 13th century Forest Charter, Thomas More’s Utopia, the Diggers’ radical agrarianism, the Paris Commune’s battle for the right to the city, and Australian forest protestors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries. By analysing these movements and their contexts, Clark and Page illustrate the origin, history and legal status of the lawful forest and its modern-day companions. Although the dominant spatial paradigm is one where private rights prevail, this book shows that communal relationships with land have always been part of our law and culture.

Examines legal and literary narratives of personhood in the 19th century

• Traces the concept of character through related areas of law, cultural discourses of character and the formal structures of the novel
• Offers new readings of works by Nathaniel Hawthorne, George Eliot, Anne Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Anthony Trollope, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde and Arthur Conan Doyle
• Analyses literary constructions of character in relation to specific legal cases and doctrines, including the right to silence, libel and privacy
• Includes new work on Anthony Trollope’s topical and editorial interest in libel
• Covers the relationship between libel, the development of privacy rights and emerging modernist aesthetics
• Presents a transatlantic approach to select works and issues, including the right to silence and privacy

Why would Hawthorne and Eliot grant their fallen women an anachronistic right to silence that could only worsen their punishment? Why did Bronte and Gaskell find gossip such a useful source of information when lawyers excluded it as hearsay? How did Trollope’s work as an editor influence his preoccupation throughout his novels with libel?

Drawing on a range of primary sources including novels, Victorian periodical literature, legislative debate, case law, and legal treatise, Cathrine O. Frank traces the ways conventions of literary characterisation mingled with character-centred legal developments to produce a jurisprudential theory of character that extends beyond the legal profession. She explores how key categories and representational strategies for imagining individual personhood also defined communities and mediated relations within them, in life and in fiction.

Sets a new trajectory for considering the intertwined relationship between theology and law through speculative cinema

• Offers 7 close readings of Hollywood speculative fiction blockbusters as theological and jurisprudential texts: Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, Snyder’s Man of Steel, Lucas and Disney’s Star Wars, Nolan’s The Dark Knight & The Dark Knight Rises, Proyas’ I, Robot, Nolfi’s The Adjustment Bureau and Jackson’s The Hobbit
• Explores key themes of law including justice, the exception, law’s violence, revolution, law’s universality, sovereignty and property as theft
• Explores key themes of theology including the nature of evil, myth and mysticism, atonement, sacrifice, compassionate acts, visions of the divine and charity as gift

Through close readings of a range of popular Hollywood speculative fiction films, Timothy Peters explores how fictional worlds, particularly those that ‘make strange’ the world of the viewer, can render visible and make explicit the otherwise opaque theologies of modern law. He illustrates that speculative cinema’s genres of estrangement provide a way for us to see and engage the theological concepts of modern law in our era of late capitalism, global empire and the crises of neoliberalism.

Examines how sovereignty inures us from the challenges associated with the climate crisis

• Engages with the work of Bruno Latour, Simone Weil, Clive Hamilton, Jacques Rancière, Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Stuart Elden and others
• Presents an innovative theory of sovereignty’s ‘aesthetics’ that contributes to contemporary debates in legal and political theory
• Outlines the key challenges for law and politics provoked by the Anthropocene epoch

In this book, Daniel Matthews shows how sovereignty – the organising principle for modern law and politics – depends on a distinctive aesthetics that ensures that we see, feel and order the world in such a way that keeps the realities of climate change and ecological destruction largely ‘off stage’. Through analysis of a range of legal, literary, ecological and philosophical texts, this book outlines the significance of this aesthetic organisation of power and explores how it might be transformed in an effort to attend to the various challenges associated with the Anthropocene, setting the grounds for a new, ecologically attuned, critical jurisprudence.

The Anthropocene thesis contends that human impact on the environment has become so extreme that the earth system as a whole has been tipped into a new state. This new geological epoch demands sensitivity to the forces that traverse human and nonhuman life, the geological, ecological and atmospheric.

The first book to investigate the place of law in modern and contemporary drama Illustrates the role of contemporary theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audienceAnalyses a range of different genres in contemporary drama, including historical, poetic, realist, documentary and ‘in-yer-face’Each chapter focuses on a particular area of law alongside the work of a particular contemporary playwright Shows how modern playwrights engage with issues such as pornography, murder, terrorism, the function of Parliament, and the role of the monarchy Theatre, according to the prominent British playwright David Hare, is our most effective ‘court of justice’. This book assesses the credibility of this arresting claim in the immediate context of contemporary British theatre by investigating the place and purpose of law in a range of modern dramatic settings and writings. Each chapter focuses on a particular area of law and the work of a particular contemporary playwright, and in doing so illustrates the important role of contemporary theatre in articulating legal and political issues to a modern audience. Exploring a range of different genres in contemporary drama, including the historical, the poetic, realist, documentary and ‘in-yer-face’, this volume explores the capacity of modern playwrights to engage with issues such as pornography, murder, the contemporary experience of terrorism, the function of Parliament and the role of the monarchy.

A new framework for examining the relationship between individual and cultural trauma, literary texts and common law

• Performs transformative interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period
• Uncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itself
• Draws on three case studies – adultery, child criminality and rape testimony – to demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the 18th and 19th centuries

Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong of adultery; how the literary ‘construction’ of childhood by 19th-century fairy tale writers affected the development of the juvenile justice system; and how evolving rules about rape victim 'character evidence' functioned as epistemological components of volatile national identity.

Readings include:

Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland and Ormond
Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles
Charles Kingsley's The Water-Babies
George MacDonald's The Lost Princess
Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Idylls of the King
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre
Henry Fielding's The Modern Husband
Sir Walter Scott's Heart of Midlothian
Samuel Richardson's Clarissa

Explores the aesthetic frames that mediate the sense(s) and experiences of justice

• Close analysis of films such as Pan’s Labyrinth, High Heels, Common Wealth, The Method, No Rest for the Wicked and Unit 7
• Engages with legal theory, film studies, aesthetics and politics
• Approaches law and film as multisensory, embodied practices
• Draws on European case studies in a field largely dominated by Anglo-American discourse

Sensing Justice through Contemporary Spanish Cinema examines the aesthetic frames that mediate the sensory perception and signification of law and justice in the context of 21st-century Spain. What senses do these frames privilege or downgrade? What kind of subjects do they show, construct, and address? What kind of affective and ethical responses do they invite? What kind of judgments do they invite?

The book addresses these questions by moving away from the focus on narrative and through a close analysis of selected contemporary Spanish films. By creating new frames of perception and signification, the films analyzed challenge the senses of law and justice traditionally taken for granted and reconfigure them anew.

Examines the role of literature in representing and critiquing the exclusion from law as an enduring tactic of state power

• Reads outlaw literature and espionage literature together
• Shows how these genres represent and critique the longstanding use of legal exclusion as a means of supporting state power
• Discusses texts ranging from the medieval Robin Hood ballads, Shakespeare’s history plays and versions of the Ned Kelly story to contemporary writing by John le Carré, Don DeLillo, Ciaran Carson and William Gibson

Outlaws are often viewed as historical figures of popular resistance, but there is another side to legal exclusion. In offering readings from two bodies of literature not normally read together – the literature of outlawry and the literature of espionage – this book shows that a substantial body of writing within these genres serves an important purpose in representing and critiquing the longstanding use of legal exclusion as a means of supporting state power.

Examines representations of the law in colonial and postcolonial fiction from and about Nigeria

• Examines representations of the law in British and Nigerian high-brow, middle-brow and popular fiction and journalism between 1900 and 1966
• Draws on rare archives of Nigerian newspaper reports and local government papers from the period
• Explores how ethical issues of late colonial and early postcolonial law in Africa were played out in the pages of highly diverse texts
• Draws on the political philosophy of Agamben, particularly his interpretation of the state of exception and the homo sacer, to illustrate the paradoxes of the colonial and postcolonial legal systems wittingly and unwittingly uncovered by these texts

Imagined States examines representations of the law in British and Nigerian high-brow, middle-brow and popular fiction and journalism. Drawing on a rich range of examples, the book focuses on the imaginative role that the state of exception played in the application of indirect rule during British colonialism and in the legal machinations of the postcolonial state. It reads works by Chinua Achebe, Joyce Cary, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace, together with a range of Nigerian market literature and journalism.

A unique application of philosophical hermeneutics, literary theory and narratology to the practice of judging

Combining her expertise in legal theory and her judicial practice in criminal law in a Court of Appeal, Jeanne Gaakeer explores the intertwinement of legal theory and practice to develop a humanities-inspired methodology for both the academic interdisciplinary study of law and literature and for legal practice.

This volume addresses judgment and interpretation as a central concern within the field of law, literature and humanities. It is not only a study of law as praxis that combines academic legal theory with judicial practice, but proposes both as central to humanistic jurisprudence and as a training in the conduct of public life. Drawing extensively on philosophical and legal scholarship and through analysis of literary works, Gaakeer proposes a perspective on law as part of the humanities that will inspire legal professionals, scholars and advanced students of law alike.

Key Features

• Focuses on the importance of judging for the humanities
• Combines legal theory and legal practice to show the importance of the bond of theory and practice in law and legal theory
• Incorporates the findings of philosophical hermeneutics and narratology for our continued thought on the position of law and literature, and law and the humanities as interdisciplinary movements
• Creates philosophical–hermeneutical building blocks for a methodology for the humanistic study of law as praxis
• Reflects on interdisciplinarity in legal studies against a backdrop of the tension between the natural sciences and the humanities

Literary case studies include:

• Gustave Flaubert’s Bouvard and Pécuchet
• Robert Musil’s The Man without Qualities
• Dutch poet Gerrit Achterberg’s asylum poems
• Pat Barker’s Regeneration
• John Coetzee’s Disgrace
• Ian McEwan’s The Children Act
• Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised
• Juli Zeh’s The Method

A user’s guide to living within a technological culture and its technologised law

Through detailed readings of popular science fiction, including the novels of Frank Herbert and Octavia E. Butler and television’s Battlestar Galactica and Doctor Who, this is the first sustained examination of legality in science fiction. Kieran Tranter includes substantive worked examples of the law and legal concepts projected by these science fiction texts, such as Australian car culture, legal responses to cloning and the relationship between legal theory and science fiction.

Successive transformations have resulted in the emergence of a total technological world where old separations about ‘nature’ and ‘culture’ have declined. With this, the tendency towards technicity within modern law has flourished – there has often been identified a mechanistic essence to modern law in its domination of human life. Usually this has been considered an ‘end’ and a loss, the human swallowed by the machine. However this innovative book sets out to re-address this tendency.

By examining science fiction as the culture of our total technological world, it journeys with the partially-consumed human into the belly of the machine. What it finds is unexpected. Rather than a cold uniformity of exchangeable productive units, there is warmth, diversity and ‘life’ for the nodes in the networks. Through its science fiction focus, it argues that this life generates a very different law of responsibility that can guide living well in technical legality.

Key Features

• Moves law and technology beyond law needing to catch-up with technology to a more embedded account of technical legality
• Provides a framework for thinking law and technology as similar, not opposites
• Connects legal theory to recent theorising about life and living in technological culture by showing the intersections between them
• Demonstrates the strength of law and the humanities for thinking about law and the world

Reappraises – and reinstates – the jurisprudence of Judge Schreber, looking beyond his mental health to his distinguished contribution to legal theory

Daniel Paul Schreber (1842–1911) was a senior German judge and jurist. He formulated a unique juridical theology of private life and developed a critical account of oikonomia, the practice of governance and administration. But his theoretical work was largely ignored due to his mental illness and his desire to be a woman in a time inhospitable to transitions. Now, Schreber’s Law looks beyond Judge Schreber's mental health to his reappraise his distinguished contribution to legal theory.

Peter Goodrich evaluates Schreber’s jurisprudence by analysing his Memoirs of my Nervous Illness (1903) and his interpreters in detail, and sets his work in the context of both the neo-Kantian pure science of fin de siècle German jurisprudence and 21st-century legal theory. In this way, Goodrich shows how Schreber’s work challenges the legal thought of his era and opens up a potentially vital approach to contemporary jurisprudence.

Key Features

• The first legal analysis of the Memoirs of Judge Schreber
• An exemplary case study of the intersection of psychoanalysis and jurisprudence
• A novel account of the pathology in law and the originality of a highly symptomatic juridical theology
• Reinstates and emplaces Schreber’s jurisprudence in a modern context of legal philosophy