Literature and Comparative Law

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, is publishing The Literary Model in Comparative Law in the American Journal of Comparative Law. Here is the abstract.

Legal theory, if it is to attain any level of generality, makes difficult, sometimes unacknowledged assumptions about geography and history. Comparative law enters as a corrective. It tempers unwarranted notions about such basic concepts as ‘norm’, ‘practice’, ‘power’, ‘process’, or ‘procedure’. This essay does not propose any systematic method for scrutinising such concepts. It instead examines possible insights offered by a comparative literary model, which can shed some light on the methods of comparative law. Brief examples from Shakespeare, Racine, and Corneille are introduced to identify obstacles of universality and relativism — or rather, of ‘comparative continuity’ and ‘comparative discontinuity’ — as they arise relative to the emergence of the nation state in late 16th and 17th century Western Europe.

Download the full text of the essay from SSRN at the link. 

Brazilian Law and Literature

Greta Olson, Justus-Liebig-University Giessen, has published Towards a Comparative and Localized Study of Brazilian Law and Literature in Direito e Literatura na Virada do Milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium 15-38 (Sonja Arnold and Michael Korfmann eds., Porto Alegre: Editora Dublinense, 2014).  Here is the abstract.

I am grateful to the editors of this volume for allowing me to contribute in the atypical form of a comment on the subject of the volume rather than with a scholarly essay. Composing an essay that might have made manifest in print what the title of my talk at the conference Literatura e Direito na virada do milênio/Law and Literature at the Turn of the Millennium had promised turned out to be an impossibility. In entitling my talk “Law and Literature in the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany (and Brazil): Comparing Legal Systems, Literatures, and Cultural Preoccupations,” I discovered that I had promised too much. As an expatriate US American living in Germany and teaching British and American studies, I could not match the knowing I have of German, British, and American legal systems, literatures,and social issues with enough information about Brazil in a short time and without facility in Brazilian Portuguese. Thus the following has the character of a programmatic sketch rather than an analytic description.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.