Newly Published: Paul Raffield, Shakespeare's Strangers and English Law (Hart/Bloomsbury, 2023) @hartpublishing @BloomsburyBooks @uniofwarwick

Newly published: Paul Raffield, University of Warwick, Shakespeare's Strangers and English Law (Hart/Bloomsbury, 2023). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Through analysis of 5 plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield examines what it meant to be a ‘stranger’ to English law in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. The numbers of strangers increased dramatically in the late sixteenth century, as refugees fled religious persecution in continental Europe and sought sanctuary in Protestant England.

This is the third sole-authored book by Paul Raffield on the subject of Shakespeare and the Law. The others are Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law (2010) and The Art of Law in Shakespeare (2017), both published by Hart/Bloomsbury.

Order online at www.bloomsbury.com – use the code GLR AP3UK for UK orders and GLR AP3US for US orders to get 20% off! Sign up to our email list to receive updates about our new titles.

 

Abrams on Shakespeare in the Courts @MizzouLaw @mobarnews

Douglas E. Abrams, University of Missouri School of Law, has published Shakespeare in the Courts 77 Journal of the Missouri Bar 132 (May-June 2021). Here is the abstract.

Professor Abrams authors a column, Writing it Right in the Journal of the Missouri Bar. In a variety of contexts, the column stresses the fundamentals of quality legal writing - conciseness, precision, simplicity, and clarity.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Newly Published: Penelope Geng, Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England (University of Toronto Press, 2021) @penelope_hg @utpress

Penelope Geng, Department of English, Macalester College, has published Communal Justice in Shakespeare's England: Drama, Law, and Emotion (University of Toronto Press, 2021). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

The sixteenth century was a turning point for both law and drama. Relentless professionalization of the common law set off a cascade of lawyerly self-fashioning – resulting in blunt attacks on lay judgment. English playwrights, including Shakespeare, resisted the forces of legal professionalization by casting legal expertise as a detriment to moral feeling. They celebrated the ability of individuals, guided by conscience and working alongside members of their community, to restore justice. Playwrights used the participatory nature of drama to deepen public understanding of and respect for communal justice. In plays such as King Lear and Macbeth, lay people accomplish the work of magistracy: conscience structures legal judgment, neighbourly care shapes the coroner’s inquest, and communal emotions give meaning to confession and repentance. An original and deeply sourced study of early modern literature and law, Communal Justice in Shakespeare’s England contributes to a growing body of scholarship devoted to the study of how drama creates and sustains community. Penelope Geng brings together a wealth of imaginative and documentary archives – including plays, sermons, conscience literature, Protestant hagiographies, legal manuals, and medieval and early modern chronicles – proving that literature never simply reacts to legal events but always actively invents legal questions, establishes legal expectations, and shapes legal norms.

 

Means on Solving the "King Lear Problem" @UofSCLaw

Benajmin Means, University of South Carolina School of Law, is publishing Solving the 'King Lear Problem' in volume 12 of the U.C. Irvine L. Rev. Here is the abstract.

In Shakespeare’s play, King Lear, an aging ruler relinquished control to two of his three daughters. The succession failed miserably, destroying his family and destabilizing his kingdom. King Lear shows why few family businesses survive beyond three generations. Understanding Lear’s failure is crucial to avoiding Lear’s fate, whether the family business in question is a monarchy, a media empire, or a hardware store. The conventional wisdom is that Lear gave away his kingdom too soon and left himself vulnerable to predatory heirs. This has been referred to as the “King Lear Problem.” The conventional wisdom is wrong. Lear’s succession plan failed because he waited too long. Like Lear, those who control family businesses are often reluctant to step aside. For example, until he was well into his 90s, Sumner Redstone declared this his succession plan was to never die. The predictable consequence was litigation that engulfed the companies he controlled, including CBS and Viacom. Yet, despite its importance, the question of family-business succession has been neglected by legal scholars. Using King Lear as a framing device, this Article identifies obstacles to succession and shows how legislative initiatives, judicial intervention, and private ordering can facilitate the timely transfer of ownership and control across generations.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Aprill on A Tax Lawyer's Interpretation of Shakespeare @EllenAprill

ICMYI: Ellen P. Aprill, LMU Loyola Law School, has published A Tax Lawyer’s Interpretation of Shakespeare, in 13 Tax Bytes: ABA Section of Taxation News Quarterly 13 (Fall 2009). Here is the abstract.

Shakespeare has been quoted and invoked in numerous contexts, but, inexplicably, the insights his immortal words bring to tax law have been ignored. This short and lighthearted piece begins to fill that gap. Expanding on my remarks in accepting the 2009 Dana Latham Memorial Award from the Los Angeles County Bar Association Taxation Section, I discuss quotations from Shakespeare’s plays that illuminate important tax doctrines.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Gordon and O'Donnell on The Power and Potential of Committed Legal Writing @DrexelKline

Deborah S. Gordon, Drexel University School of Law, and Kait O'Donnell have published Of Skepticism, Illegitimacy, and Fools: The Power and Potential of Committed Legal Writing. Here is the abstract.

The law is once again facing a legitimacy crisis—one brought into full relief during Justice Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearings, wherein the future of the independent judiciary was, if not decimated, at least hotly debated. Though this current crisis may be novel in its precise implications, such crises are not new. Indeed, skepticism concerning the legitimacy of the law and the act of lawyering has been leveled at the profession from its beginnings. Nevertheless, the divisiveness of our current political and social climate has given the issue fresh meaning. How can legal practitioners and participants respond to this crisis without perpetuating a cycle of cynicism? This article argues for an increased reliance on several skeptics of the law—William Shakespeare and Simone de Beauvoir among them—to help realign our understanding of what contemporary legal actors—and legal writers in particular—can do in the face of illegitimacy. It draws on these classic thinkers to propose a model of “committed legal writing” that advocates for disrupting illegitimate modes of legal reasoning with a goal of restoring legitimacy to legal practice more generally.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Pershina on Metaphors of Crime and Punishment in Shakespeare's "Macbeth" @UAHes

Marina A. Pershina, University of Alcala, has published Metaphors of Crime and Punishment in Shakespeare’s 'Macbeth'. Here is the abstract.

The aim of the article is to study the notions of crime and punishment in the Shakespeare’s tragedy “Macbeth”. It analyses the role of supernatural elements and metaphorical symbols as key components of the images of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth. Complex metaphors and poetic symbols go through the play’s plot. They follow the development of the characters’ inner struggle, reveal their intentions, and finally reflect their fall. Most symbols represent the supernatural dichotomy of the heaven (king Duncan’s virtues are compared to angels) and the hell (Macbeth is called a devil). Even the scenes of nature are depicted fantastically. The words of Hecate and the ‘weird sisters’ express the idea of existence in the external human world of something unknown that affects people’s internal motivation. At the end of the tragedy, metaphors in Macbeth’s soliloquies embody the themes of death, destruction, moral disintegration of the personality of the person who lost the meaning of life. The results of the research show that metaphors and symbolic elements are implied in the tragedy to create a psychological portrait of main characters. On the one hand, Shakespeare used them to show individuals. On the other hand, these characters become the collective images of sinners and righteous men.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Delahunty on Commonwealth and Commodity: Shakespeare's "King John"

Robert J. Delahunty, University of St. Thomas School of Law, is publishing Commonwealth and Commodity: Shakespeare's 'King John' in the Journal of Catholic Legal Studies. Here is the abstract.

Shakespeare increasingly, and deservedly, enjoys the reputation of being a political thinker of the first rank. In his King John (ca. 1595) — one of his most infrequently performed and unappreciated plays — Shakespeare uses a twelfth century crisis over King John’s right to succeed to the Crown as a vehicle for exploring the subtle interplay of law, custom and power in the fashioning of political legitimacy. The play is an extended meditation on the effects of John’s illegitimate kingship. Shakespeare presents us with a decentered moral universe that is spiraling towards self-destruction and that is governed solely by the principle of power-seeking or “commodity.” The action of the play concerns how the disintegrating world of “commodity” can be rescued from itself before it collapses. Although Shakespeare does not use the term “commonwealth” here, it figures in other Tudor-era writers on politics, often in opposition to “commodity.” Indeed, a polar opposition between “commodity” and “commonwealth” structures the play. The roots of the idea of “commonwealth” grow out of a pre-modern communitarian tradition. In the play, the idea is epitomized in the unhistorical, but dramatically powerful, character of “the Bastard,” the illegitimate son of John’s brother, King Richard the Lion-Hearted. King John reveals the corrosive effects of the individualistic ethos of modernity that was already emerging in Elizabethan England. It also dramatizes the power of a countervailing English nationalism that may have looked back to a vanishing past but that was also taking on fresh vitality in this period. This paper seeks to situate a wrongly neglected play in its rich context of Elizabethan law, culture and politics, and to show why it remains of enduring value.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Literature and the Judicial Opinion

Via Benjamin Woodring, news that Judge Michael Baylson went literary in his ruling in favor of the City of Philadelphia, finding that the federal government cannot cut off funding because the city insists it will only surrender undocumented immigrants if the feds have proper warrants. Here, courtesy of Dr. Woodring, is a link to Judge Baylson's opinion. It begins with quotations from Hamlet and Coriolanus and from Dr. Woodring's own article Liberty to Misread, published in the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, and continues to the Odyssey.

I think a lot of literature profs out there must be very pleased! More about the law and literature references in this opinion here in an Atlantic essay by Walt Hunter of Clemson University, one of the aforementioned lit profs.

Law and the humanities lives!

Karen Raber, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018) @BloomsburyBooks @olemissenglish

New from Bloomsbury Publishing: Karen Raber, Professor of English, University of Mississippi, Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory (2018) (The Arden Shakespeare). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Shakespeare and Posthumanist Theory charts challenges in the field of Shakespeare studies to the assumption that the category “human” is real, stable, or worthy of privileging in discussions of the playwright's work. Drawing on a variety of methodologies - cognitive theory, systems theory, animal studies, ecostudies, the new materialisms - the volume investigates the world of Shakespeare's plays and poems in order to represent more thoroughly its variety, its ethics of inclusion, and its resistance to human triumphalism and exceptionalism.

 

Shakespeare the Crime Author @CrimeReads @DwyerMurphy

Dwyer Murphy ranks some of Shakespeare's plays as crime fiction, noting that one can see Romeo and Juliet as "gritty urban crime" and Hamlet as a "private eye" drama. Number one on the list? The Scottish play, which is "outlaw noir"--"where morality and time have been turned upside down and a dark shadow has been cast over the land."

More here.

ICYMI: Strain on "The Winter's Tale" and the Oracle of the Law

ICYMI:

Virginia Lee Strain, The Winter's Tale and the Oracle of the Law, 78 ELH 557 (Fall 2011).

Virginia Lee Strain, Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature @jcalvo11 @EdinburghUP

Virginia Lee Strain, Loyola University (Chicago), has published Legal Reform in English Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book investigates rhetorical and representational practices that were used to monitor English law at the turn of the seventeenth century. The late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean surge in the policies and enforcement of the reformation of manners has been well-documented. What has gone unnoticed, however, is the degree to which the law itself was the focus of reform for legislators, the judiciary, preachers, and writers alike. While the majority of law and literature studies characterize the law as a force of coercion and subjugation, this book instead treats in greater depth the law’s own vulnerability, both to corruption and to correction. In readings of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Gesta Grayorum, Donne’s ‘Satyre V’, and Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure and The Winter’s Tale, Strain argues that the terms and techniques of legal reform provided modes of analysis through which legal authorities and literary writers alike imagined and evaluated form and character.

 

Via @jcalvo11.

Forthcoming From DeGruyter: As You Law It: Negotiating Shakespeare, edited by Daniela Carpi and François Ost @degruyter_lit

Forthcoming from DeGruyter:

As You Law It: Negotiating Shakespeare (Daniela Carpi and François Ost, eds., 2018) (Law and Literature; 15).

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.

Schultz and Ost on Shakespearean Legal Thought in International Dispute Settlement @IHEID

Thomas Schultz, King's College London, School of Law, and Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, and François Ost, Saint-Louis University, Brussels, have published Shakespearean Legal Thought in International Dispute Settlement. Here is the abstract.

In this article, the authors examine the contributions of Shakespearean legal thought to our understanding of core aspects of international dispute settlement. These aspects include: the sweeping role of masks in law and in the resolution of disputes; the construction and deconstruction of authority; the purpose of law in arousing desire and thus action; the limits in recognizing informal international law as law; the benefits of exaggeration; the problematic ambition of adjudicators; the key role of passion, against rationality, in understanding and dealing with international disputes; the decision-making resources to be found in logics of life; exercising measure in the enforcement and reach of law; remembering that law deals with human beings in our quest for law’s purity and systematic organization; resisting single-mindedness; the relevance of a dialectic form of proportionality; and the inescapable need to embrace uncertainty. The authors also discuss the general relevance of law & literature, and law & theatre, for all manner of legal professionals and review Shakespeare’s own legal background and thus his a priori ability to deal with legal matters.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

John Kerrigan on Shakespeare's Binding Language (OUP, 2016) @Canbridge_Uni

ICYMI:

John Kerrigan, Professor of English, Cambridge University, has published Shakespeare's Binding Language (Oxford University Press, 2016).

This remarkable, innovative book explores the significance in Shakespeare's plays of oaths, vows, contracts, pledges and the other utterances and acts by which characters commit themselves to the truth of things past, present, and to come. In early modern England, such binding language was everywhere. Oaths of office, marriage vows, legal bonds, and casual, everyday profanity gave shape and texture to life. The proper use of such language, and the extent of its power to bind, was argued over by lawyers, religious writers, and satirists, and these debates inform literature and drama. Shakespeare's Binding Language gives a freshly researched account of these contexts, but it is focused on the plays. What motives should we look for when characters asseverate or promise? How far is binding language self-persuasive or deceptive? When is it allowable to break a vow? How do oaths and promises structure an audience's expectations? Across the sweep of Shakespeare's career, from the early histories to the late romances, this book opens new perspectives on key dramatic moments and illuminates language and action. Each chapter gives an account of a play or group of plays, yet the study builds to a sustained investigation of some of the most important systems, institutions, and controversies in early modern England, and of the wiring of Shakespearean dramaturgy. Scholarly but accessible, and offering startling insights, this is a major contribution to Shakespeare studies by one of the leading figures in the field.

 

Kevin Curran's New Book on Shakespeare and Law Published by Northwestern University Press @kevdcurran

New from Northwestern University Press: Kevin Curran, University of Lausanne, has published Shakespeare's Legal Ecologies: Law and Distributed Selfhood (2017) (Rethinking the Early Modern Series). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies offers the first sustained examination of the relationship between law and selfhood in Shakespeare’s work. Taking five plays and the sonnets as case studies, Kevin Curran argues that law provided Shakespeare with the conceptual resources to imagine selfhood in social and distributed terms, as a product of interpersonal exchange or as a gathering of various material forces. In the course of these discussions, Curran reveals Shakespeare’s distinctly communitarian vision of personal and political experience, the way he regarded living, thinking, and acting in the world as materially and socially embedded practices. At the center of the book is Shakespeare’s fascination with questions that are fundamental to both law and philosophy: What are the sources of agency? What counts as a person? For whom am I responsible, and how far does that responsibility extend? What is truly mine? Curran guides readers through Shakespeare’s responses to these questions, paying careful attention to both historical and intellectual contexts. The result is a book that advances a new theory of Shakespeare’s imaginative relationship to law and an original account of law’s role in the ethical work of his plays and sonnets. Readers interested in Shakespeare, theater and philosophy, law, and the history of ideas will find Shakespeare’s Legal Ecologies to be an essential resource.

Order the paperback edition with the code NUP2017 for a 25 percent discount per Dr. Curran (see his tweet) @kevdcurran.  

Del Gobbo on Law and Feminism in The Merchant of Venice @danieldelgobbo

Daniel Del Gobbo has published Portia in the Same Voice?" Law and Feminism in The Merchant of Venice at SexText: The SDS Blog.

Call For Papers: Shakespeare and the Pedagogies of Justice @ANZAMEMS

 Via @BauerStefan

Shakespeare and the Pedagogies of Justice – Call For Papers

Shakespeare and the Pedagogies of Justice

Shakespeare scholars regularly encounter social justice issues in the material that we study and teach. Most often in the classroom our engagement with such issues takes the form of thematic identification and critical parsing. Yet we struggle to form more direct, material connections between coursework and social justice work. This book is for professors of early modern literature who want to heighten the intellectual impact of their courses by thoughtfully using their classrooms as laboratories for social formation and action. Much as Paolo Freire sought to reformat the relationship between teachers and students through his “pedagogy of the oppressed,” we are seeking productive ways of reformatting the relationship between students and this challenging material–ways that move them and us toward social action. We invite chapters that describe and model the doing of social justice work with and through early modern texts, and that claim the academic (not merely social) benefits of integrating social justice work into courses. To rethink the syntax, we might say we are interested in how social action can grow out of the pedagogical tools we employ in the early modern classroom. Bad pedagogy can produce quietism, but we hope to trace some ways in which an alive classroom can spark social change. To that end, we are especially interested in essays that do not approach teaching a single text so much as introduce methodologies, curricula, and assignments that integrate early modern texts with doing social justice.

Topics may include:

• Social justice topics courses
• Service learning
• Community engagement
• Evidence and truth in a post-truth world
• Teaching in the anthropocene
• Inclusive pedagogies
• Students as knowledge producers
• Teaching at an HBC, women’s college, native college, community college
• The global Renaissance
• Teaching performance as social justice
• The scholarly implications of social justice pedagogy
• Multiple and competing “Renaissance world pictures”
• Implications of post-modern ontologies on pedagogy
• The classroom as a community, laboratory, incubator, and change agentFor consideration please send a chapter abstract (500-1000 words), bio (~250 words) and CV (<4 abstracts="" deadline="" for="" is="" nbsp="" pp="" strong="" style="border: 0px; margin: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">27 January, 2017

 completed chapters expected by 15 December, 2017.  Please send full set of materials to both Hillary Eklund, Loyola University New Orleans hceklund@loyno.edu and Wendy Beth Hyman, Oberlin College whyman@oberlin.edu.

This entry was posted in cfp on 5 January 2017.

Raffield on The Art of Law in Shakespeare

Paul Raffield, Professor of Law, University of Warrick, is publishing The Art of Law in Shakespeare (Hart Publishing, 2017). Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, the author analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of the book is that the 'artificial reason' of law was a complex art form, which shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare. Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court, and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences at the plays of Shakespeare. In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love's Labour's Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter's Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judaeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).