Bücher der Reihe Law & Literature

In today's world, the increasing progress in biotechnologies has paved the way for profound challenges to basic notions defining the human existence. This book aims to merge the two fields of bioethics and law through the literary text, by taking into consideration the transformations of the concept of persona at which we have nowadays arrived.

The book traces the changing relation and intense debates between law and literature in U.S. American culture, using examples from the 18th to the 20th century (including novels by Charles Brockden Brown, James Fenimore Cooper, Harper Lee, and William Gaddis). Since the early American republic, the critical representation of legal matters in literary fictions and cultural narratives about the law served an important function for the cultural imagination and legitimation of law and justice in the United States. One of the most essential questions that literary representations of the law are concerned with, the study argues, is the unstable relation between language and truth, or, more specifically, between rhetoric and evidence. In examining the truth claims of legal language and rhetoric and the evidentiary procedures and protocols which are meant to stabilize these claims, literary fictions about the law aim to provide an alternative public discourse that translates the law's abstractions into exemplary stories of individual experience. Yet while literature may thus strive to institute itself as an ethical counter narrative to the law, in order to become, in Shelley's famous phrase "e;the legislator of the world"e;, it has to face the instability of its own relation to truth. The critical investigation of legal rhetoric in literary fiction thus also and inevitably entails a negotiation of the intrinsic value of literary evidence.

The volume "Visualizing Law and Authority. The common theme of the essays consists in an examination of the scopic field and of regimes of visibility in phenomenological terms, arguing that law constitutes a cognitive and aesthetic field of normative world-making.

This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas to Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today.

The concept of the just war poses one of the most important ethical questions to date. Can war ever be justified and, if so, how? When is a cause of war proportional to its costs and who must be held responsible? The monograph Just and Unjust Wars in Shakespeare demonstrates that the necessary moral evaluation of these questions is not restricted to the philosophical moral and political discourse. This analysis of Shakespeare's plays, which focuses on the histories, tragedies and Roman plays in chronological order, brings to light that the drama includes an elaborate and complex debate of the ethical issues of warfare. The plays that feature in this analysis range from Henry VI to Coriolanus and they are analysed according to the three Aquinian principles of legitimate authority, just cause and right intention. Also extending the principles of analysis to more modern notions of responsibility, proportionality and the jus in bello-presupposition, this monograph shows that just war theory constitutes a dominant theoretical approach to war in the Shakespearean canon.

This volume focuses on the sublime and proposes that the ethical aspect involved in the legal sublime is to contain the arrogance of the law.It also draws attention to the "and" of interdisciplinary literary-legal studies: Law's disciplinary autonomy has been challenged.

The volume deals with four main themes, each of which is analysed by a scholar with a background in the humanities and a scholar with a legal background (or lawyer), respectively: Law and Humanities;

Criminals as Animals from Shakespeare to Lombroso demonstrates how animal metaphors have been used to denigrate persons identified as criminal in literature, law, and science. Its three-part history traces the popularization of the 'criminal beast' metaphor in late sixteenth-century England, the troubling of the trope during the long eighteenth century, and the late nineteenth-century discovery of criminal atavism. With chapters on rogue pamphlets, Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Defoe and Swift, Godwin, Dickens, and Lombroso, the book illustrates how ideologically inscribed metaphors foster transfers between law, penal practices, and literature. Criminals as Animals concludes that criminal-animal metaphors continue to negatively influence the treatment of prisoners, suspected terrorists, and the poor even today.

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking human rights seriously has never been more urgent than it is today. The eighteen essays which comprise Literature and Human Rights are written in a spirit of interdisciplinarity, and are intended to make a signficant contribution to this vital and enduring debate.

The idea of human rights is not new. But the importance of taking human rights seriously has never been more urgent than it is today. This book includes eighteen essays that are written in a spirit of interdisciplinarity, and are intended to make a significant contribution to this vital and enduring debate.

Ancient declamation defies easy categorization. It stands at the crossroads of several modern disciplines. This book contains essays from international scholars, that engages with the multidisciplinary nature of ancient declamation, focusing on the interactions in declamation between rhetoric, literature, law, and ethics.

Analyses the concept of the "body" in the Renaissance period and its articulations and interpretations both in the legal field and the theatre.