The Legal Imagination


Book Description

White extends his theory of law as constitutive rhetoric, asking how one may criticize the legal culture and the texts within it. "A fascinating study of the language of the law. . . . This book is to be highly recommended: certainly, for those who find the time to read it, it will broaden the mind, and give lawyers a new insight into their role."—New Law Journal




Judicial Imagination


Book Description

Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg.




Shakespeare and the Legal Imagination


Book Description

This work offers an analysis of constitutional law, examining Shakespeare's plays as legal texts. Professor Ward uses the plays as a starting point to investigate the development of constitutional ideas such as sovereignty, commonwealth, conscience and moral law, and the art of government. In the developing area of law and literature, this book examines how Shakespeare's work offers a rich source of textual material on legal subjects.




Law and Imagination in Troubled Times


Book Description

This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the ‘legal imagination.’ Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate throughout the legal system. The collection probes ‘the transatlantic constitution’ and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability. The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future. The work provides stimulating reading for those working in the areas of legal philosophy, legal history and law and humanities and law and language.




Law and the Utopian Imagination


Book Description

Law and the Utopian Imagination seeks to explore and resuscitate the notion of utopianism within current legal discourse. The idea of utopia has fascinated the imaginations of important thinkers for ages. And yet—who writes seriously on the idea of utopia today? The mid-century critique appears to have carried the day, and a belief in the very possibility of utopian achievements appears to have flagged in the face of a world marked by political instability, social upheaval, and dreary market realities. Instead of mapping out the contours of a familiar terrain, this book seeks to explore the possibilities of a productive engagement between the utopian and the legal imagination. The book asks: is it possible to re-imagine or revitalize the concept of utopia such that it can survive the terms of the mid-century liberal critique? Alternatively, is it possible to re-imagine the concept of utopia and the theory of liberal legality so as to dissolve the apparent antagonism between the two? In charting possible answers to these questions, the present volume hopes to revive interest in a vital topic of inquiry too long neglected by both social thinkers and legal scholars.




Artefacts of Legal Inquiry


Book Description

Winner of the 2022 Commendation for Excellence by the International Association for Legal and Social Philosophy (IVR). What is the value of fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios in adjudication? This book develops three models to help answer that question: inquiry, artefacts and imagination. Legal language, it is argued, contains artefacts – forms that signal their own artifice and call upon us to do things with them. To imagine, in turn, is to enter a distinctive epistemic frame where we temporarily suspend certain epistemic norms and commitments and participate actively along a spectrum of affective, sensory and kinesic involvement. The book argues that artefacts and related processes of imagination are valuable insofar as they enable inquiry in adjudication, ie the social (interactive and collective) process of making insight into what values, vulnerabilities and interests might be at stake in a case and in similar cases in the future. Artefacts of Legal Inquiry is structured in two parts, with the first offering an account of the three models of inquiry, artefacts and imagination, and the second examining four case studies (fictions, metaphors, figures and scenarios). Drawing on a broad range of theoretical traditions – including philosophy of imagination and emotion, the theory and history of rhetoric, and the cognitive humanities – this book offers an interdisciplinary defence of the importance of artefactual language and imagination in adjudication.




The Judicial Imagination


Book Description

Tells the story of the struggle to imagine new forms of justice after Nuremberg Returning to the work of Hannah Arendt as a theoretical starting point, Lyndsey Stonebridge traces a critical aesthetics of judgement in postwar writers and intellectuals, including Rebecca West, Elizabeth Bowen, Muriel Spark and Iris Murdoch. Writing in the false dawn of a new era of international justice and human rights, these complicated women intellectuals were drawn to the law because of its promise of justice, yet critical of its political blindness and suspicious of its moral claims. Bringing together literary-legal theory with trauma studies, The Judicial Imagination argues that today we have much to learn from these writers' impassioned scepticism about the law's ability to legislate for the territorial violence of our times. Key Features *Returns to the work of Hannah Arendt as the starting point for a new theorisation of the relation between law and trauma * Provides a new context for understanding the continuities between late modernism and postwar writing through a focus on justice and human rights *Offers a model of reading between history, law and literature which focuses on how matters of style and genre articulate moral, philosophical and political ambiguities and perplexities *Makes a significant contribution to the rapidly developing fields of literary-legal and human rights studies




To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth


Book Description

To the Uttermost Parts of the Earth shows the vital role played by legal imagination in the formation of the international order during 1300–1870. It discusses how European statehood arose during early modernity as a locally specific combination of ideas about sovereign power and property rights, and how those ideas expanded to structure the formation of European empires and consolidate modern international relations. By connecting the development of legal thinking with the history of political thought and by showing the gradual rise of economic analysis into predominance, the author argues that legal ideas from different European legal systems - Spanish, French, English and German - have played a prominent role in the history of global power. This history has emerged in imaginative ways to combine public and private power, sovereignty and property. The book will appeal to readers crossing conventional limits between international law, international relations, history of political thought, jurisprudence and legal history.




Tax and Time


Book Description

How tax law perpetuates injustice but might instead be used as a powerful force for creating a more just and equitable society The relationship between tax law and society, Anthony C. Infanti asserts, is too often overlooked by those who work outside of the field of fiscal policy. Yet, the way a country collects and spends its revenue can be viewed as a quantifiable reflection of how a country sees itself, sending messages about both what it values now and what it aspires to be in the future. Tax and Time sheds light on two of the most misunderstood universal human experiences: time and taxes. Anthony C. Infanti asserts that time in tax law is the product of pure imagination and calls into question the world beyond time that we have created for ourselves. Written with clarity and powerful insight, Tax and Time demonstrates how the tax laws have been used to imaginatively manipulate time in ways that perpetuate economic and social injustice. With its social justice focus, the book brings a sorely needed critical perspective to technical tax policy discussions. Infanti calls for a systematic reexamination and reworking of the relationship between time and tax law, asserting that the power of the legal imagination to manipulate time in tax law can both correct past injustices and help us to envision—and actually work toward—a better and more just society.




Investment Treaties and the Legal Imagination


Book Description

This book brings a new perspective to the subject of international investment law, by tracing the origins of foreign investor rights. It shows how a group of business leaders, bankers, and lawyers in the mid-twentieth century paved the way for our current system of foreign investment relations, and the investor-state dispute settlement mechanism.