ICYMI: Cervone on Sworn Bond in Tudor England: Oaths, Vows and Covenants in Civil Life and Literature

 ICYMI:

Thea Cervone, Sworn Bond in Tudor England: Oaths, Vows and Covenants in Civil Life and Literature (McFarland Publishing, 2011). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

 

The swearing of oaths is a cultural phenomenon that pervades English history and was remarkably important during the sixteenth century. This multi-disciplinary work explores how writers of the Tudor era addressed the subject in response to the profound changes of the Reformation and the creative explosion of the Elizabethan period. Topics include how the art of rhetoric was deployed in polemic, the way in which oaths formed bonds between Church and State, and how oaths functioned in literature, as ceremony and as a language England used to describe itself during times of radical change.

 

Kohm and Kohm on C. S. Lewis's Influence in American Case Law

Lynne Marie Kohm and Joseph Kohm, both of the Regent University School of Law, have published C. S. Lewis's Influence in American Case Law. Here is the abstract.

The writings and works of C.S. Lewis have undoubtedly influenced culture through literature, but also through science, academia, education, the arts, and numerous aspects of society. Few scholars, however, have observed his influence on the law. This piece explores how Lewis's work has affected the law in juridical reasoning, and how it has inspired law as literature. Lewis's influence in American case law is not only astonishing in its breadth, but also in its earnestness in integrating the law with efforts to find justice and truth. When Lewis wrote, "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else," it also included the law and jurisprudence. Law and culture are inextricably linked, via the tug-of-war between where one is consistently seeking dominance over the other. Law directs the theory and practice of basic universal rules held and utilized around the globe. In this piece two lawyers explore the influence of C. S. Lewis and his writings in American case law, and in the rule of law generally. In balancing these tensions, Lewis has been not only instructive, but influential, and this essay investigates how he has become somewhat of a cultural icon to learned jurists.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bernick on The Opinion in Yellow

Evan D. Bernick, Northern Illinois University College of Law, has published The Opinion in Yellow as a Northern Illinois University College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

Four months ago, the Supreme Court of Arkham published an obscene document which cannot fairly be called an opinion. I cannot explain it and dare not try. What I can and will do is relate the substance of my conversation with a former clerk who is widely thought to be its principal author. The task ahead fills me with dread; I press on because I can think of nothing else to do under the circumstances.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Ayaz on Modernity, Mimicry, and Moksha: A Postcolonial Study of R. K. Narayan's The Guide and V. S. Naipaul's A House For Mr. Biswas

Amreen Ayaz, University of Aberdeen, has published Modernity, Mimicry, and Moksha: A Postcolonial Study of R. K. Narayan's The Guide and V. S. Naipaul's A House for Mr Biswas. Here is the abstract.

This research examined the concepts of modernity, mimicry, and moksha, their applications in postcolonial literature, and their altered meanings in the modern world. It studied modernity through various dimensions like colonialism, Nanni’s exploration of colonisation through time and religion, intergenerational variations in its impact, the redefined meaning of success through tools like life and career planning, and the makings of a modern man. The concept of mimicry was analysed through the works of scholars like Bhabha, Uytanlet, Harold, Chakrabarti, Alvarez, Phukan, Mandal, Sultana, and others. It looked at themes like the need for mimicry, its dual aspects, intra-national mimicry, masculinised mimicry, and gaps in postcolonial studies. The work also delved into the idea of mimicry by drawing on theories from other disciplines, like Hegel’s dialectics, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, evolutionary biology, performance theory, systems theory, and cultural hegemony theory, while drawing historical examples from India’s freedom struggle. The research aimed to explore the identity conflict in the present youth of the erstwhile colonial nations, which are experiencing massive changes in culture through globalisation and the fast-paced import of ideas. It endeavoured to bring out a synthesis between conflicting values of tradition and modernity, and highlight the possibility of evolved ways of living that the selected works of postcolonial writers were attempting to convey to their readers. For the purpose, the traditional framework of moksha was woven in with the literary theories of modernity and mimicry, explaining its meaning through religion, philosophy and socio-cultural perspectives. Manu’s Dharma Shastra was focused upon to trace the process of achievement of moksha; its modernised version was explored through the different paths taken by the characters of Naipaul and Narayan, ultimately answering the question of how to achieve moksha in a hybridised environment. Through the journeys of Raju and Mohun Biswas, the conclusion was reached that in the modern world, moksha is found not in a return to tradition, but in the courage to embrace one’s true identity amidst change.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Natelson on Virgil and the Constitution

Robert G. Natelson, Independence Institute, has published Virgil and the Constitution. Here is the abstract.

All three legends on the Great Seal of the United States are adaptations of verses attributed to the Roman poet Virgil—reflecting Virgil’s status as the unofficial “poet laureate” of the American Founding. This article examines how Americans employed Virgil’s poetry during the debates over the United States Constitution. It also explains how the selected passages implicate constitutional meaning.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Upcoming Conference: Melville's Legacy For Law and the Humanities, University of Cincinnati Law School, October 24-25, 2025

Upcoming Conference at the University of Cincinnati Law School, October 24-25, 2025

Melville's Legacy for Law and the Humanities

Co-sponsored by the University of Cincinnati Law School and the Law and Humanities Institute

See the website link below for a list of speakers and more information about registration. Speakers will include Brook Thomas, Richard Weisberg, Paul Finkelman, Marguerite Allen, Jenny Doctor, Sanford Levinson, and Robin West. 

 

https://www.lawandhumanitiesinstitute.org/events/melvilles-legacy-for-law-and-the-humanities-2

Paradise on Agape and Law in Byzantium

Brandon L. Paradise, Rutgers Law School, Newardk, has published Agape and Law in Byzantium. Here is the abstract.

This study focuses on agape love and Eastern Orthodox soteriology as master narratives in the Byzantine legal imagination. It is an approach to the conference theme that inspired this chapter--the "sacred arts of Orthodoxy" in so far as the "art of legal disputation," so central to Byzantine literature, is a much neglected area of study, where rhetoric, ethics, legal theory and theology all coincide in a symphonia which is distinctively "Orthodox." As scholars have recently argued, law in Byzantium is better understood as a rhetorical, literary negotiation of broad, extra-legal religious, cultural and philosophical narratives than as an autonomous, formalist-positivist discipline that mirrors the scientific aspirations of modern western legal systems.560 Rather than attempting to generate formally correct "legal" solutions derived exclusively from rule or formalist discourse, Byzantine law seeks to render 'substantive justice' as measured by extra-legal narratives, including—and perhaps most importantly for this study—the master narratives of the gospel and Orthodox theology.561 Concretely put, this means that law in Byzantium is more an exercise in literary negotiation and applied morality than an exercise in technocratic and autonomous rule reasoning. Thus, unlike modern western legal systems, Byzantine law clearly imagines itself less as legal science and more as artistic practice. The praxis of this artistic endeavor is the shepherding of society on the basis of agape-love and in the direction of Orthodox soteriology, so that law becomes a force for realizing these two extra-legal cultural ideals.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Khan on Civil Rights Lawyering and the Reconstruction of Law and Literature

Almas Khan, Civil Rights Lawyering and the Reconstruction of Law and Literature, at 29 European Journal of English Studies 1 (2025). Here is the abstract.

Interrogating the place of race in law and literature has newfound urgency in the wake of the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2023 decision striking race-based affirmative action in university admissions and a renewal of the “canon wars” in U.S. politics and academia. Amidst this turbulence, legal scholars have published landmark articles unmasking the racist intellectual history of several doctrinal fields. Their critiques inform this essay, which charts a counter-genealogy of law and literature’s growth as a field grounded not mainly in academic work but civil rights praxis. The essay first summarises the traditional narrative of law and literature’s emergence as an interdiscipline, close reading canonical texts that craft a genealogy of elite white men building the field. Next, the essay presents a narrative of the field centralising the work of civil rights lawyers from Reconstruction to the civil rights era. Turning to this alternative archive highlights Black lawyers’ role in constructing the field, including through theorising about interdisciplinarity and re-forming literary genres to promote racial justice. The essay ultimately encourages law and literature scholars to consider how an exclusionary intellectual history of the field has shaped their research and how a more inclusive intellectual history can revitalise the interdiscipline.

Here is a link to the abstract and the notes. 

Gurnham on Stopping the Boats, Changing the Narrative: How the Migrant Refugee Bildungsroman Became a Ghost Story

David Gurnham, Stopping the Boats, Changing the Narrative: How the Migrant Refugee Bildungsroman Became a Ghost Story, 37 Law & Literature 29-52 (2025). Here is the abstract.

What literary conventions best help us understand the migrant refugee’s claim for protection, and the terms on which law claims to offer it? One contender to have attracted attention recently is “bildungsroman” (“formation novel”), since the narrative of the refugee escaping danger and oppression to find safety and stability within a host state arguably maps onto bilgungsroman’s themes of a protagonist’s difficult personal journey from margins to social acceptance and flourishing. However, this view is now seriously undermined by legislative initiatives in the UK aimed at ensuring migrant refugees who cross the English Channel in small boats should have no cause to hope for such a happy ending. By way of a close reading of the narrative implications of these initiatives, this article proposes a thorough rethink of our approach to figuring the irregular migrant refugee. Rejecting bildungsroman as now implausibly optimistic, the article suggests we look instead to the ghost, whose “presence” is typically the chief problem for those to whom it appears, whose “shape” is uncertain, and whose complaints and demands inspire dread and strenuous efforts to make it disappear. The article employs these conventions to draw a new relationship between refugee migration law and the arts, and argues that if the UK’s policies for “stopping the boats” may be characterized as an attempt to effect such a disappearance, then the migrant refugee’s reappearance in visual art offers a ghostly figuration of resistance and of admonishment at injustice unredressed and obligations unfulfilled. The article traces these qualities and explores their critical potential through two recent works of visual art, namely “The Walk” (2021–22) and Gideon Mendel’s “Dzhangal” [“Jungle”] (2016–17). Both of these works admit of multiple readings, but both also crucially resist the punitive and reductive framing of migrants in law in some surprising ways.

Download the article here.

Call For Papers: Anamorphosis--International Journal of Law & Literature

From Dr. Amanda Muniz Oliveira, Universidade Federal de Juiz de Fora (UFJF)

Call for Papers ANAMORPHOSIS - International Journal of Law & Literature (from Brazil)

Upcoming Issue & Deadlines
Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis;
Earlier submissions receive earlier decisions.

About the Journal
ANAMORPHOSIS is the only Brazilian scholarly periodical entirely devoted to the intersection of Law and the Humanities. Since 2015 it has offered an open forum for rigorous, interdisciplinary dialogue between legal scholarship, literary studies, philosophy, cultural theory and related fields. The journal is fully open-access, charges no article-processing or submission fees, and operates a strict double-blind peer-review system.

What We Publish?
We welcome original, unpublished work (maximum two authors) in any of the following categories:

1. Research Articles: Theoretical or empirical studies that advance the field of Law & Humanities or Cultural Legal Studies; 
2. Translations: Scholarly translations of texts not yet published in Portuguese, accompanied by a critical introduction, aiming to broaden the dissemination of foreign scholarship in Latin America.
3. Reviews:Critical reviews of recent books or landmark works relevant to Law, Humanities, and Cultural Studies.

Doctoral candidates and early-career researchers are especially encouraged to submit.

Languages
Manuscripts may be submitted in English, Spanish, French, Italian, German or Portuguese. 

Approved texts in Portuguese are published with an English translation, and vice-versa; texts in other languages appear alongside a Portuguese translation, broadening readership and impact.

Why Submit to ANAMORPHOSIS?

• No fees - publish without APCs or submission charges.
• Global visibility through respected indexing services and open-access licensing.
• Fast, fair review - editorial screening followed by at least two external reviews.
• Distinguished international board spanning Europe, the Americas and beyond.
• Interdisciplinary reach - engage scholars across legal theory, literature, cultural studies, history, philosophy, the arts and social sciences.

How to Submit

• Register or log in at https://periodicos.rdl.org.br/anamps.
• Follow the five-step submission workflow, ensuring all files are anonymised for double-blind review.
• Adhere to our Author Guidelines (template and style guide available on the website).
• Upload a brief biographical note in a separate file once the paper is accepted.

Contact
Questions about scope or preparation? Write to the Editorial Office at anamps@rdl.org.br or henriete@rdl.org.br We look forward to receiving your contribution and to continuing the conversation between law, literature and society.

Share this call with colleagues, graduate students and research networks interested in the vibrant field of Law & Humanities.

Carvalho on Three Books and the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Today? What Do the Works of Kafka, Orwell, and Faoro Have In Common With Today's Brazilian Supreme Court?

Cristiano Carvalho, University of Sao Paulo, Faculty of Law, Department of Economic, Financial, and Tax Law, has published Three Books and the Brazilian Supreme Federal Court Today - What do the works of Kafka, Orwell, and Faoro have in common with today's Brazilian Supreme Court? originally in Portuguese on May 27, 2025 at www.migalhas.com.br. Here is the abstract.

This article examines the current role of the Brazilian Supreme Court through the lens of three seminal works: The Trial by Franz Kafka, 1984 by George Orwell, and Os Donos do Poder by Raymundo Faoro. Drawing parallels between literary dystopias and institutional reality, the text argues that the Court has progressively abandoned its constitutional mandate as guardian of rights and due process, assuming instead a protagonistic and often unchecked political role. The article reflects on the erosion of the rule of law, the inversion of legal logic, and the rise of selective repression, suggesting that future historians may view this period as one of the darkest chapters in Brazilian constitutional history.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Papke on The Jurisprudence of Transcendentalism

ICYMI: David Ray Papke, Marquette University Law School, has published The Jurisprudence of Transcendentalism at 60 Idaho L. Rev. 185 (2024). Here is the abstract.

This article begins by sketching the evolving legal fabric of Antebellum America, stressing the way law and legal institutions came to play larger and more trusted roles in sociopolitical life during that period. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and the other Transcendentalists reacted negatively to this societal “legalization,” and as the second part of this article indicates, their jurisprudence was a largely negative critique of law and legal institutions. The third part of the article explores the part this jurisprudence played in the Transcendentalists’ critique of the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850. In conclusion, the article maintains that even in the present the jurisprudence of the Transcendentalism is a valuable demystification of man-made law and a warning against an unreflective belief in law and the rule of law.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Stern on Crime and Literature, Narrative, and Doctrine

Simon Stern, University of Toronto, Faculty of Law, has published Introduction: Crime and Literature, Narrative and Doctrine at 1 Modern Criminal Law Review 160 (2025). Here is the abstract.

This Introduction to a special issue of the Modern Criminal Law Review+ discusses the history of criminal law as a focus within the field of Law and Literature, from the early 20th century to the present, including bibliographies anthologies, and critical studies. Work in this area once focused primarily on the depiction of crime, criminals, and criminal trials in literary narratives (“law in literature”). Over the last thirty years, scholars have moved far beyond this focus, asking more foundational and conceptual questions, such as how literature can help us understand the epistemology and analysis of evidence, the structure of the trial, the development of doctrines and concepts such as attempt and mens rea, the changing treatment of crimes such as treason and conspiracy, and the representation of intention in forensic advocacy and judicial writing. What these investigations share is a concern with literary form and modes of representation, on the one hand, and structures of legal analysis, on the other. Instead of asking how crime and criminals are portrayed in imaginative works, scholars have inquired into the conditions that make these portrayals possible. This more foundational approach has been far more productive and continues to open up new avenues for research. After reviewing these developments, the introduction turns to the contributions in this special issue by Elise Wang, Hannah Walser, Anna Schur, Abhinav Sekhri, and Daria Bayer, discussing them in relation to this recent line of scholarship. All the contributions may be found on the MCLR+ site.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Leary on Screaming Into the System: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Flannery O'Connor, Violence, and the Criminal Law

Mary Graw Leary, Catholic University of America, has published Screaming Into The System: The Symbiotic Relationship Between Flannery O’Connor, Violence, And The Criminal Law. Here is the abstract.

This year marks the 100th birthday of one of America’s most influential writers in history – Flannery O’Connor. Much has been written about the violence in Flannery O’Connor’s work, but relatively little about the criminal and legal aspects of the violence. This is rather surprising given the author’s documented influence from actual crimes in stories such as A Good Man is Hard to Find and The Partridge Festival. It is also surprising given her use of crimes (including homicide, fraud, human trafficking) in her work, as well as her particular focus on the marginalized and vulnerable. O’Connor herself noted that she often used violence to capture her audience’s attention and ultimately bring them to her point. This paper explores that influence on her work through original research at the Flannery O’Connor Archives. However, as these original documents demonstrate, with all things that involve Flannery O’Connor, there is much more to this examination than simply how she was influenced by criminal events. Within many of these criminal events, the law played a critical role in the violence, often as a catalyst. Furthermore, as with many criminal events, the poor and vulnerable suffer at the hands of an uncaring society. O’Connor saw this and utilized the criminal law to comment upon this societal reality. This law played a critical role in her literature not simply as a historical fact or inspiration, but as a silent character. More to the point, this silent character’s frequent failure to protect the vulnerable is a repeated theme in O’Connor’s fiction. This symbiotic relationship between criminal law, violence, and O’Connor’s fiction is not only one where O’Connor was influenced by and utilized actual crime and violence in her writing. But it is also one where she can be a profound inspiration and influence on the modern criminal justice system’s advocates. O’Connor’s vocational approach to her writing also has much to offer the modern justice system’s advocates. Drafts of her talks in the O’Connor Archives demonstrate that she was challenged to write for an audience whose values and modern sensibilities were hostile to her messages of what she called the “prophetic vision” of truth, judgment, grace, and mercy. The modern criminal justice advocate finds herself similarly challenged. Tasked with protecting the most vulnerable – often the unseen or undervalued in society – she must convince a jury to see and value such people and understand the truth of what has occurred enough to do something unpopular in today’s culture: render a judgment. Presented with unspeakable violence, this advocate must convey it to her audience, the jury, who often is resistant to believing it occurred. O’Connor frequently wrote about the writer’s “sense of frustration [being] great because [the writer] has to force by whatever means he can this vision on a resisting or a blank audience.” (Catholic Writer in the Protestant South – draft talk for Southern Literary Festival, April 20, 1962) How O’Connor navigated that vocation to bring an audience to a place of understanding people and truth can operate as a significant influence on those today forged with that task. This paper examines the synergistic relationship between Flannery O’Connor’s fiction, crime, violence, and the criminal law and what it can offer the modern criminal justice system – a system characterized by a search for truth and justice. It will also suggest that O'Connor offers an inspirational framework for those who participate in the system as advocates for the vulnerable.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Williams on Flannery O'Connor and the Law

Telia Mary U. Williams, Northern Illinois University College of Law, has published Flannery O’Connor and the Law. Here is the abstract.

Celebrated Southern fiction author Flannery O'Connor treats her readers to not only a "Christ-haunted" South, but also a "law-haunted" one. Her short stories present a fictional, yet realistic world wherein characters are tacitly preoccupied with legal conflicts, and who engage in quasi-legal storytelling and legalistic modes of speaking and thinking. Ultimately, the futility of O'Connor's characters' insistence on their individual rights and hyper-technical legal formalities, rather than community, reveal to the reader the need for law to be tempered with humility and empathy. Along the way, O'Connor brings the reader full circle and shows us that even legal formalism may serve as an occasion for grace.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

van de Berge and Gaakeer on Rereading Kafka's The Trial: Responsibility, Reflection, and the Case of the Dutch Childcare Allowance Scandal

Lukas van de Berge, Utrecht University Faculty of Law, and Jeanne Gaakeer have published Rereading Kafka's The Trial: Responsibility, Reflection, and the Case of the Dutch Childcare Allowance Scandal. Here is the abstract.

As standard interpretation has it, Kafka's novel The Trial depicts how an innocent and defenceless individual is crushed by powerful and absurdly bureaucratic institutions. No wonder, therefore, that The Trial is often linked to the British Post Office Scandal, the Australian Robodebt Scheme, the Dutch Childcare Allowance Scandal and other such affairs that rendered many people helpless in their fights against flawed systems and disinterested governments. This paper explores the significance for judicial ethics and legal practice of an alternative interpretation of The Trial-and of Kafka's works more in generalthat has been most compellingly proposed by Walter H. Sokel. An important conclusion will be that Sokel's alternative understanding of Kafka and the Kafkaesque yields even more important insights into the workings of modern law and government than the standard interpretation.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Bernick on Cthulhu and the Constitution

Evan D. Bernick, Northern Illinois University College of Law, has published Cthulhu and the Constitution. Here is the abstract.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was born in 1892, nineteen years after the enactment of the Comstock Act and six years before the Supreme Court in United States v. Wong Kim Ark affirmed birthright citizenship as a constitutional guarantee. He dreamed of monsters and brought them to life with language that has not lost its power to horrify. The best-known entity in his bestiary is Cthulhu, whom people cannot behold without going mad. Cthulhu and co. are ancient, unknowable, and unkillable. Wrote Lovecraft in The Dunwich Horror: “The Old Ones were, the Old Ones are, and the Old Ones shall be.” One of the most insightful engagements with Lovecraft’s work and legacy, Alan Moore’s Providence, imagines Lovecraft as an instrument of actually existing cosmic entities who use his extraordinary literary talents to bring their world into contact with ours. But let’s be real: Lovecraft’s monsters were, are fictional, and their origins lie in nothing so creditable. Lovecraft was racist, sexist, and xenophobic, and he was obsessively fearful of the contamination of the nation’s sexual purity—especially through immigration. These prejudices and phobias inspired his monsters and his descriptions of their acolytes. This Essay describes present-day efforts to revive old, monstrous legal institutions and ideas and put them in the service of policies Lovecraft might have loved. The Trump Administration is committed to a constitutional program that is informed by racism, sexism, and xenophobia. One of the major components of that program is an ongoing attack on the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship. Another is an attack on reproductive rights, which is likely to include an effort to revive the long-dead Comstock Act and use it to ban the distribution of abortion pills. These attacks have late-nineteenth-century analogs and depend upon late-nineteenth century statutes and legal theories. Studying how popular movements resisted and ultimately sapped these statutes and theories of power with, without, and despite law can equip us to defeat these monsters once again. They were and they are, but they shall not be.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Stern on Victims of Circumstantial Evidence: Murder, Proof, and Wrongful Convictions in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Victims of Circumstantial Evidence: Murder, Proof, and Wrongful Convictions in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction. Here is the abstract.

The early nineteenth century witnessed the flourishing of a genre that today seems almost unbearably hackneyed, predictable, and lifeless. These tales feature a murder, followed by the arrest of an innocent person—usually an upstanding, sincere, and honest young man. In a few stories he is convicted and executed, and the truth comes out later. More commonly, he is spared at the last moment, because the truth emerges just before the execution or at the very end of the trial. These stories propose a wide array of meanings for “circumstantial evidence,” including rumor, motive, and various kinds of physical evidence. This chapter contextualizes these stories in relation to the popular crime writing (fiction and nonfiction) of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; offers examples of suspects framed by an enemy, framed by nature, and suspected on very weak evidence; and shows how these tales are related to late nineteenth-century detective fiction. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of People v. Vereneseneckockockhoff (Cal. 1900), an important decision that recapitulates and responds to the basic concerns motivating this genre.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Sullivan on Death and Discretion: Some Thoughts on Living

Barry Sullivan, Loyola University Chicago School of Law, is publishing Death and Discretion: Some Thoughts on Living in volume 35 of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

Like judges, administrative officials exercise legal authority that significantly impacts the lives of others, and, in doing so, they must confront the problem of authority as "a problem for the individual mind faced with the difficulty of deciding what to do or to say." (James Boyd White, Acts of Hope309 (1994) Their work, like the work of judges, has a profound moral dimension. In this essay, Professor Sullivan considers that moral obligation through an analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2022 film Living, together with Akira Kurosawa's film Ikiru and Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. An earlier version of the essay was presented at a Yale Law School conference in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of James Boyd White's path-breaking book The Legal Imagination.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Vasconcelos Vilaça on Broken April, Narratology, Legal Normativity, and the Experience of Law

Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça, Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México (ITAM) Law School, has published Broken April: Narratology, Legal Normativity, and the Experience of Law, in Law and Critique (2024). Law and Critique, 0[10.1007/s10978-024-09400-w]

This article delves into the intersection of literature and legal normativity through the lens of Ismail Kadare’s novel Broken April. It explores how literary theory enhances philosophical analysis of law by examining the novel’s portrayal of the Kanun, a set of customary laws in Albania, highlighting the complexity of legal normativity and the impact of law on individual subjectivity and social order. The core argument posits that Broken April serves not only as a reimagined narrative of Albanian customary law, but also as a device to question and reflect on the broader implications of law’s normative force, and its reliance on a plethora of aesthetically effective symbols, in constituting both human behavior and the social imaginary. Through the literariness of Broken April, this article explains how law infiltrates and molds the social and psychological dimensions of life, ultimately shaping legal experience. It argues that literature offers a unique vantage point to reassess our understanding of law’s role in society, challenging conventional and nonconventional legal theories that overlook the cultural and emotional dimensions of law.

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