https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6807-7587
This issue of Law and Humanities is the first since the journal’s inception in 2007 not to be co-edited, and this editorial the first not to bear the name either of Gary Watt or Paul Raffield. I’m so very grateful to the two of them for bringing me to this role, and hope that I can maintain the high editorial standards that they set, at least until Routledge/Taylor & Francis realize that there’s been a terrible mix-up.
If the journal is (as the ‘aims and scope’ blurb on our website announces) ‘a forum for scholarly discourse within the arts and humanities around the subject of law’ in textual form, then our annual Roundtable workshop is likewise such a forum viva voce. In the summer of 2023, Matteo Nicolini hosted the fifth and most ambitious (not to mention hottest, in the literal sense) iteration of this event, at his home institution at the University of Verona on July 12th. The event marked the 400th anniversary of the first appearance of Shakespeare’s First Folio in 1623, and featured paper presentations from international scholars from across Europe and beyond. The interest (for lawyers, as well as literature scholars) in the anniversary, extended to an otherwise strictly for-pleasure visit to Tomba di Giulietta the following day. Engraved at the entrance to the former Franciscan monastery containing the once lowly and abandoned water trough now presented to visitors as Juliet’s final resting place, in English and Italian, is an extract from Romeo’s final speech in which Shakespeare deploys a characteristically intriguing legal metaphor:
Looking ahead to the summer of 2024, the sixth Roundtable event will take advantage of another approaching posthumous publishing anniversary, namely the centenary of the first publication in Berlin in 1925, and against the express wishes of its largely unknown author, of Der Process, a novel about a young man’s struggle to defend himself against unspecified criminal charges. Much has been written about Kafka and the law, not least the notion of guilt without (apparent) crime and the oppressiveness and inaccessibility of the structures and machinery of the state. Our interest in gathering new scholarly material for debate in July 2024, and then, we hope, publication in 2025, is to explore and re-evaluate the imprint that Kafka’s work has left on humanities and arts approaches to legal thought, a remit that includes but is also much broader than ‘law and literature’. We are interested in papers that explore the diverse examples of translations, adaptations, borrowings, transmutations of Kafka’s distinctive style and themes as pertaining to law, and that are to be found now in textual, visual, theatrical and dramatic cultures. The deadline for submission of abstracts for paper presentations is 2 January 2024, and the event in July 2024 will be co-convened by Ekaterina Yahyaoui (University of Galway, School of Law) and I, probably at the University of Southampton. We encourage all with an interest in the topic, and something fresh and insightful to say about it, to consider submitting a title and abstract.
It is typically a process of some intellectual difficulty to draw a thematic thread through all of the articles collected for a given issue of this journal, challenging the editor(s) to do so without resorting too much to the sorts of generalizations and abstractions for which law is itself known. Having said that, it also the case that the more one thinks about it, the more clearly such themes do emerge, and the articles in this issue at some level all treat of notions of representation (of legal processes, values and principles, and of an individual’s or a community’s interests) and the relations between legal abstraction and materiality (how can the experience of law be most usefully, or truthfully, conceptualized and conversely how do law’s abstractions manifest in specific things, places and actions?).
The issue opens with Patrick O’Callaghan’s ‘Enlightened Remembering and the Paradox of Forgetting: From Dante to Data Privacy’, an article that is surprisingly rare amongst those broadly falling within the ‘law and literature’ category for drawing on Dante as its literary reference point for its reflections on current legal issues. The central question for O’Callaghan, particularly pertinent in the digital or information age, is that of how a person can represent themselves – to the world and to themselves – if they must continually contend with reminders of their own past deeds that weigh them down with pain, embarrassment, even shame. Should such a person do as Dante’s sad inhabitants of Hell are advised to – and ‘abandon all hope’ of being able to leave a troublesome past behind, or is there room for a right to forget, or rather be (partially) forgotten – a process that O’Callaghan reframes more positively as ‘enlightened remembering’?
The article that follows picks up on the theme of memory, though in a very different way. Two articles by Helen Rutherford and Clare Sandford-Couch, ‘Joseph Bouet in the Durham Criminal Court (c.1825-1856): Picturing Nineteenth Century Courtroom Actors’ Parts 1 (‘Lines of Enquiry’) and Part 2 (‘Three Case Studies’), consider the significance of courtroom sketches held in the archives of Durham University which might otherwise have been lost to obscurity. The research brings to light images that offer a vital supplement to the stuffy and staid representation of judges in the formal portraits, as well as to the grotesque caricatures of ‘the criminal’ that we tend to associate with nineteenth century phrenology. As the article outlines, Bouet’s sketches bring humanity and humour to the depiction of the judge, the witness and the defendant. Neither satirizing or othering, nor blandly neutral, Bouet’s sketches are unofficial observations of a legal process of nearly two centuries ago, and Rutherford and Sandford-Couch’s combination of visual reading and archival and biographical research brings to life the human forms he found there.
In Cecilia Gebruers’s article ‘From Metaphor to Materiality: Grounding Intersectional Legal Thought’, we find ourselves amongst a community of women involved in disputes over plots of indigenous land in western La Pampa, a region of the central Argentine province. Taking seriously implications of the metaphor of ‘intersectionality’, Gebruers’s article describes the various intersecting roads that the author experienced in gathering and analyzing her research data, both literally and figuratively: in the locations for interviews that could only be reached by asking local people the way (or failing that, by navigating by a complicated triangulation of satellite images and networks of unmarked paths), and in the experiences of disputing parties facing disadvantage and discrimination both from modern property law of title and communitarian rights, compelling them to find alternative paths. As a representation of the legal landscape, ‘intersectionality’ for Gebruers goes much deeper, and is more complex, than a simple crossroad of competing identities.
The last two research pieces are an article by Anja Louis, Andrea Subryan and Chalen Westaby (‘Law and Emotions in The Split’), and an essay by Susanna Menis (‘The untold story of the first Italian-Turinese female lawyer: Netflix’s The Law According to Lidia Poet’), each evaluating the representation of women lawyers on the contemporary small screen. Louis and colleagues focus on the hugely successful BBC drama from 2018 to 2022 and its central character, the family lawyer Hannah Stern (who, we are told, is only the second woman barrister ever to take the central role, after Maxine Peak’s depiction of Martha Costello in Silks (2011–2014)). As a woman in a masculinist professional environment, Stern must negotiate gendered expectations and pressures across her professional (public) and family (private) lives. Meanwhile, Menis’s attention is trained on Lidia Poet, the first ever woman accepted to join the Turin Bar in 1883 (albeit briefly: she was removed by the Turin Court of Appeal after just three months of practice), made the ambivalent heroine of the Netflix series The Law According to Lidia Poet in 2023. Frustrated by the show’s problematic depiction, Menis traces connections between the real Lidia Poet’s struggle to be accepted in the male-supremacist Italian legal order and the parallel stories of Bertha Cave and Gwyneth Bebb in England. In all three cases, Menis shows how senior judges interpreted prevailing legal frameworks so as to exclude women from practicing law, their inclusion consequently having to be explicitly legislated for after the First World War.
The issue is rounded off finally by Christos Marneros’s review of the recent monograph by Elena Loizidou, Anarchism: An Art of Living Without Law and Alex Feldman’s review of Julie Stone Peters’ Law as Performance: Theatricality, Spectatorship, and the Making of Law in Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Europe. Loizidou’s book, as Maneros reports, reaches for a purer rejection of legal structures and ideas than legal scholars have imagined hitherto. Loizidou, Marneros tells us, argues for the dismantling, not just of law’s more oppressive, hypocritical or coercive aspects, but all of it, including the very ideas of equality, justice and legal rights. For Loizidou, law is ‘by its sheer existence’ an affront to the best of humanity: love, freedom, humour and we must thus learn to live without it. Loizidou’s critical approach to criminal law at Lancaster Law Department helped to influence my 21-year-old self’s decision in 1998–1999 to pursue academic legal study rather than a training contract at a law firm. Her book is likely to be similarly stimulating and provocative, though it does make this editor wonder if being so committed an anarchist scholar in a Law school is a little like being a committed atheist scholar in a Divinity school: not impossible perhaps, but surely full of professional, pedagogical and ethical tensions and ambivalences.
There is one related and final point to make in this introduction. An important part of the journal’s mission, besides publishing original research articles, is to offer critical reception to new developments elsewhere in law, the arts and humanities. Our esteemed colleague Marta Iljadica has now stepped down after four years as the journal’s Reviews Editor, leaving the role open for someone new. At the time of writing, a Call for applications for the vacant role is out (via @law_humanities, the journal’s profile on the social media platform formally known as Twitter), and by the time of publication of this issue we hope to be able to announce who that person might be. Whoever it is faces an impossible task, albeit for good reasons: the richness of law and humanities scholarship means it is highly unlikely that we will be able to represent more than a fraction of relevant developments there, let alone arts productions with a bearing on law as well.