Jurisliterature and Transgression

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2008

ociety, every society, understood structurally, namely as an agency of civilisation, cannot help wielding power, the power of instituting the human life that takes place in it. And in order to do so, it cannot but establish itself theatrically, as the stage or scaffold that carries the social edifice. It is on this stage that society ceaselessly releases the fictions which enable its subjects to think the normative order theatrically, which is to say, structurally. Pierre Legendre: 148

Liverpool Law Review, 2013

Through the work of Jean-Luc Nancy, and following recent publications that champion the theoretical significance of jurisdiction, this article reads jurisdiction as a technique of legal fiction-making and as capable of exposing an originary ontological category of “being-with.” Rather than thought of purely as an expression of the law’s sovereign authority, it is argued that jurisdiction is a privileged point at which we can see the law’s fragility and thus open to critical intervention and interruption. Following Nancy’s understanding of “writing” and “literature” as that which exposes being-with, I suggest that we might name such strategies of creative intervention “juriswriting.” This account of jurisdiction, developed by thinking with Nancy’s account of ontology, is explored with reference to the common law constructions of jurisdiction in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

The broad dissemination of digital communication technologies is raising disturbing questions about the nature of truth as representation. This epistemological crisis shares an uncanny affinity with the crisis of representation that lay at the heart of the baroque era during the 17th century in Europe. The resolution of that crisis, through the work of Descartes and others, came on the heels of a philosophical shift from the image to the sign. Not incidentally, that move was accompanied by significant political and juridical developments, including: the origin of legal positivism, the rise of conventionalism (or nominalism), the disenchantment of nature and the decline of natural law, and the emergence of the modern nation-state. The semiotic model today, however, is strained to the breaking point. Infinitely mutable digital signs proliferate as copies of copies; signifiers have been shorn of the signified. The ensuing mutation of the Cartesian sign into the digital image has been a...

2017

Poetry is the representation and expression of life. Wilhelm Dilthey, "Goethe and the Poetic Imagination" (1910) 1 James Boyd White is one of the few scholars who have made the connection between poetry and law consistently in their work but, in this respect, have had little impact on the field at large; see, for instance, his chapter "The Judicial Opinion and the Poem: Ways of Reading, Ways of Life" in Heracles' Bow (1985) and his essay "Imagining the Law" (1994). Lenora Ledwon's textbook Law and Literature (1996) engages poetry similarly to The Legal Imagination. For studies in poetry see also Barbara Johnson's work, for example, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (1986) and, more recently, Kieran Dolin's exploration of poetry and law in "Introduction to Law and Literature: Walking the Boundary with Robert Frost and the Supreme Court" (2007). 2 The underrepresentation of poetry in studies of Law and Literature has been commented on-yet not remedied-by a number of scholars, including Johnson in "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" (1998) and Grey in "Steel Against Intimation: The Motive for Metaphor of Wallace Stevens, Esq." (1990; in particular 231-32); Eberle and Grossfeld have offered an overview of possible relations between "Law and Poetry" (2005), yet only implicitly make the claim that this presents a lacuna in the field. We should note here that our observations on the exclusion of poetry from Law and Literature are made from the perspective of our familiarity with the U.S.-American side of the field and may, hence, not entirely apply to Western European practices of Law and Literature. As Greta Olson and Martin Kayman have suggested, Law and Literature scholars in the UK may be turning more frequently to poetry than their U.S.-American counterparts; see also Greta Olson's essay in this issue.

English Language Notes

In t r o d u c t i o n : M a k i n g S p a c e FOR JU RIS-D lC TIO N S N a n G o o d m a n uris-of the la w -dictio-speech. I invoke the Latin etym ology of this crucial legal concept to highlight the connection between tw o of the three term s that concern us in this special issue of ELN-language and the law. The law is made through and by language.The law is speech and, perhaps less obviously but no less undeniably, speech is law. Both sides of this equation have been at the heart of interdisciplinary studies of law and literature from the start. Indeed, the focus on discourse in both disciplines has form ed the com mon thread between them from the early work of James Boyd W hite to the m ore recent exploration of the "inter-discipline" by Kieran Dolin and others.1 To begin w ith the etym ology of the word "jurisdiction," however, is to obscure the third and perhaps m ost im portant feature of ju risdiction-space-the area or territory over which the law prevails or a given court can rule. Indeed, there is no general definition of jurisdiction that does not depend on the concept of space.2 The O xford English Dictionary gives as one o f its prim ary definitions, "The extent or range o f judicial or adm inistrative power; the ter ritory over which such power extends." To the definition of jurisdiction as a site of law and language, then, we must add the concept of "space" (or place or territory), noting crucially that it is the recognition of a given space as distinct from others that gives the court its ju ris dictional authority. Cornelia Vismann gives the com plexity of this thought a com pellingly concrete articulation. "The prim ordial scene of the nomos [or law]," she writes, "opens with a drawing o f a line in the soil.This very act initiates a specific concept of law, which derives order from the notion of space."3 At the same time, in the focus on nomos and the drawing of lines as acts o f jurisdiction, she draws in my other tw o concepts. Space, law, and lan guage-the three concepts are inextricably intertwined. The new essays in this special issue on jurisdiction engage this description of legal order and to varying degrees the confluence o f all three aspects of jurisdiction. In attem pting to juggle all three term s at once, moreover, these essays depart from previous studies of ju ris diction that have tended to focus on one or another aspect o f it. Shaun McVeigh's Jurisprudence o f Jurisdiction, for example, though innovative and wide ranging, focuses largely, as its title suggests, on the im plications of jurisdiction for the law;4 conversely, Bradin Cormack's brilliant and richly textured, The Power to Do Justice, tends to study jurisdiction from a literary point of view.s The m ajor purpose of bringing scholars together

2019

This paper explores and recognizes common points of intersection of law and literature. Different literary texts have legal language, court scenes, cross examinations, lawyers, witnesses, judge, and audience. The main focus of this paper is to identify such events from literary texts and also to present instances that people take into the courts from literary texts. Law and literature originate and develop, after all, from the same culture and society. Humanities and social sciences are common grounds of origin and development of law and literature. They are related with each other. They do have correlation on the basis of culture, social norms and values, and humanities. In this paper, they discussed on the grounds of cognitive and behaviouristic aspects of human life.

2009