Daniela Carpi

François Ost

Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice, and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The volume aims at highlighting some of the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, also taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on law and literature in the Renaissance.

As You Law It - Negotiating Shakespeare

Scientific experiments and medical improvements in recent years have augmented our bodies, made them manipulable; our personal data have been downloaded, stored, sold, analyzed; and the pandemic has given new meaning to the idea of ‘virtual presence’. Such phenomena are often thought to belong to the era of the ‘posthuman’, an era that both promises and threatens to redefine the notion of the human: what does it mean to be human? Can technological advances impact the way we define ourselves as a species? What will the future of humankind look like? These questions have gained urgency in recent years, and continue to preoccupy cultural and legal practitioners alike. How can the law respond and adapt to a world shaped by technology and AI? How can it ensure that technological developments remain inclusive, while simultaneously enforcing ethical limits to its reach? The volume explores how fictional texts, whether on the page or on screen, negotiate the legal dilemmas posed by the increasing infiltration of technology into modern life.

Law and Culture in the Age of Technology

Jeanne Gaakeer

The past few decades in legal and literary studies have challenged the boundaries raised by the different concepts of law and literature espoused by a great variety of theorists. Law's traditionally assumed disciplinary autonomy has been challenged by those who have pursued interdisciplinary methods of research. In particular, the concept of the sublime has moved out of the strictly philosophical and literary fields and crossed the borders between disciplines, finding an application also in the juridical field. On one hand, this volume proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law. On the other hand, the volume draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies and offers new daring comparisons between philosophical fields and between apparently distant historical periods.

Subliminal Tensions in Law and Literature

Liminal Discourses

Klaus Stierstorfer

The well-known challenges of international migration have triggered new departures in academic approaches, with 'diaspora studies' evolving as an interdisciplinary and even transdisciplinary field of study. Its emerging methodology shares concerns with another interdisciplinary field, the study of the relations between law and literature, which focuses on the ways in which the two cultural practices of law and literature mutually negotiate each other and on the question after the ontological commensurability of the domains. This volume offers, for the first time, an attempt to provide an interface between these overlapping interdisciplinary endeavours of literary studies, legal studies, and diaspora studies. In doing so, it explores new approaches and invites new perspectives on diasporas, migration and the disciplines that study them, hopefull also adding to the cultural resources of coping with a swiftly changing social landscape in a globalizing world.

Diaspora, Law and Literature

Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today’s globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective , dealing with artificial intelligence.

From the Canon to the Anti-Canon: Literary and Juridical Subversions

Monsters and Monstrosity

In recent years, the well-established field of human anthropology has been put under scrutiny by the new data offered by science and technology. Scientific intervention into human life through organ transplants, euthanasia, genetic engineering, experiments connected to the genetic code and the genome, and varied other biotechnologies have placed ethical beliefs into question and created ethical dilemmas. These scientific inventions influence our views on birth and death, on the construction of the body and its technical reproducibility, and have problematized the concept of the human persona. The purpose of bioethics, the science of life, is to find new values and norms which will be valid for a multicultural society. Bioethics is, today, a well-respected topic of research that has brought together philosophers and experts to discuss the limits of science and medicine. The aim of this book is to merge the two fields of bioethics and law (or biolaw) through the literary text, by taking into consideration the transformations of the concept of persona at which we have nowadays arrived. The new meaning of the term ‘persona’ represents in fact the final point of a long-standing quest for man's sense of his own being and human dignity, and of his capacity to live in social interrelations. The volume presents a wide range of perspectives, comprising methodological approaches, legal and literary aspects.

Bioethics and Biolaw through Literature

Marett Leiboff

The latest development concerning the metaphorical use of the fairy tale is the legal perspective. The law had and has recourse to fairy tales in order to speak of the nomos and its subversion, of the politically correct and of the various means that have been used to enforce the law. Fairy tales are a fundamental tool to examine legal procedures and structures in their many failings and errors. Therefore, we have privileged the term "fables" of the law just to stress the ethical perspective: they are moral parables that often speak of justice miscarried and justice sought.Law and jurists are creators of "fables" on the view that law is born out of the facts (ex facto ius oritur) so that there is a need for narrative coherence both on the level of the case and the level of legislation (or turned the other way around: what does it mean if no such coherence is found?). This is especially of interest given the influx of all kinds of new technologies that are "fabulous" in themselves and hard to incorporate in traditional doctrinal schemes and thus in the construction of a new reality.

Fairy Tales in a Legal Context

Fables of the Law

What can fables and fairytales tell us of law, its practices and ideals? Drawing on real and metaphorical literary and jurisprudential accounts and practices of law, this volume reveals that law has recourse to fables and fairytales as moral exempla, as a new form of law and literature, found in diverse sources ranging from the fables of de La Fontaine and fairytales of Perrault and Grimm to the modern fairytales of True Blood and Harry Potter.

Daniela Carpi

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