A New Issue of Polemos (2015, Issue 1)

Here is the Table of Contents for Issue 1, 2015, of the journal Polemos (deGruyter). The subject is Shakespeare and the Law.

Pólemos 2015 | Volume 9 | Issue 1

Contents

Focus

Daniela Carpi and Jeanne Gaakeer:

Focus: Shakespeare and the Law 1

François Ost:

Weak Kings and Perverted Symbolism. How Shakespeare Treats the

Doctrine of the King’s Two Bodies 7

Gary Watt:

Free Will and Folly in As You Like It 15

Daniela Carpi:

Romeo and Juliet: The Importance of a Name 37

Andrew J. Majeske:

Unreliable Sources for Law: Dying Declarations in Shakespeare’s King John,

Othello & King Lear 51

Sidia Fiorato:

Disruptions and Negotiations of Identity in Act 1 of Shakespeare’s

Othello 61

Research

John Casey Gooch:

Illegal Search and Seizure, Due Process, and the Rights of the Accused:

The Voices of Power in the Rhetoric of Los Angeles Police Chief

William H. Parker 83

Jeanne Gaakeer:

The Judge’s Voice: Literary and Legal Emblemata 99

Filippo Sgubbi:

Power and the Trial: The Tension Between Voices and Silence 125

Heinz Antor:

Voice, Authority and the Law in Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly

Gang 131

Chiara Battisti:

Silence, Power and Suicide in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours 157

Paola Carbone and Giuseppe Rossi:

Celsus and Chatwin go Walkabout 175

François Ost and Isabelle Ost:

Representing the Unrepresentable: Making Law Anyway? 199

Book Reviews

Chiara Battisti:

Gary Watt. Dress, Law and Naked Truth. A Cultural Study of Fashion

and Form 221

Maria Pina Fersini:

José Calvo González. Direito curvo 233

Examining Moral Realism Through Shakepeare

Matthew H. Kramer, Churchill College, Cambridge University; University of Cambridge, Faculty of Law, has published Shakespeare, Moral Judgments, and Moral Realism as University of Cambridge Faculty of Law Research Paper No. 1. Here is the abstract.

Among the many areas of scholarship that can be enriched through an engagement with Shakespeare’s plays, moral philosophy is a particularly fruitful territory. In the present essay, I draw on a couple of Shakespearean tragedies to come to grips with a challenge that has sometimes been mounted against moral realism. Moral realism I take to be the thesis that morality (or ethics more broadly) is objective along a number of different ontological, epistemic, and semantic dimensions. Here the challenge to be countered - with assistance from Shakespeare - is focused on the foremost respect in which morality is semantically objective. That is, some opponents of moral realism have sought to deny that moral judgments are ever truth-apt, by contending that such judgments are inherently possessed of motivational force. This essay will examine their reasoning, with the aim of showing that (insofar as the reasoning is sound) it can readily be accommodated by moral realism.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Criminal Law In "Othello"

Richard H. McAdams, University of Chicago Law School, has published Vengance, Complicity and Criminal Law in Othello, in Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (Martha Nussbaum and Richard Streier eds.; University of Chicago Press, 2012). Here is the abstract.

Criminal law offers an interesting frame for examining Othello, while the play offers an interesting thought experiment for law. First, the play shows the virtue of legal processes by the tragedy its absence produces. In Act V, Othello refuses to accord Desdemona the very procedures that vindicated him of a false charge in Act I. Second, Othello brilliantly illustrates some perpetually vexing problems in the doctrine of complicity. Through Iago, the play vividly shows that an encourager of crime can be more responsible for its occurrence – more monstrous – than the one he encourages. Third, I use English law of the late 16th century to explain certain puzzling choices Iago makes. Iago avoids being present at the scene of Desdemona’s killing and dissuades Othello from using poison in order to preserve his status as an accessory, which allows him to avoid criminal liability for Desdemona’s death under a variety of scenarios. Iago’s brilliant deviousness allows him to manipulate law as well as people.

The full text is not available from SSRN.