Events

Law and Humanities Roundtable 2019 29 June, University of Warwick 

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Programme 

09:30 Welcome and Registration 10:00 Session One 11:30 Refreshments 12:00 Session Two 13:30 Lunch 14:30 Session Three 16:00 Refreshments 16:30 Discussion and Reflection 17:00 End 

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Session One 

Trauma Narrative, Testimony, and Comics Golnar Nabizadeh, University of Dundee 

Reflections on Sexual Violence, Law, and Art Sophie Doherty, Durham University 

Session Two 

Metaphor and Moral Plausibility in Legal Judgment: Constructing Culpability on Fragile Foundations? David Gurnham, University of Southampton 

Of Sovereigns and Giants: Children’s Literature and the Enchantment of International Law Sophie Rigney, University of Dundee 

Session Three 

Judging from Experience: Law, Praxis, Humanities Jeanne Gaakeer, Erasmus School of Law 

What’s in an ‘And’? The Missing Humanism in the Law of Law and Humanities Luke Mason, Birmingham City University 

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Session One 

Trauma Narrative, Testimony, and Comics Golnar Nabizadeh, University of Dundee 

Reflections on Sexual Violence, Law, and Art Sophie Doherty, Durham University 

In The Juridical Unconscious (OUP 2002, 2), Shoshana Felman suggests that the two world wars and other disastrous events of the twentieth century “brought to the fore the hidden link between trauma and the law”, and that this link was “dramatized” in the twenty-first century in the aftermath of the destruction of the World Trade Towers, through the event’s widespread transmission on our television screens. Traumatic events such as these shape social, economic, and political contours, and domains of inquiry such as the law come to bear the imprint of those contours in their genealogy. Significantly, the law has come to increasingly recognize victims’ claims through the understanding that testimony may be communicated in more complex ways than previously understood. Within this context, the term ‘dramatized’ reminds us that the ways in which traumatic events are remembered, forgotten, or silenced, depends on the stories that accumulate within the breach that instantiates trauma, and how these narratives are focalised. 

Given that communal, social, and individual traumata shape cultural frameworks in surprising, productive, and profound ways, it is not surprising that literary narratives, hinged as they are on the art of representation, offer fruitful ways through which we might imagine and formulate what constitutes trauma. How then, do literary narratives articulate this deviation, and how does the law grapple with the same? 

In response, this paper will pursue two distinct, yet interrelated avenues of inquiry: first, what is the relationship between trauma and narrative in contemporary legal proceedings; and second, how do graphic novels and comics communicate, and articulate demands for literary justice when the legal domain fails, in part or altogether, to afford a platform for testimony? The scope of this enquiry is necessarily limited, but will proceed in three steps: first, by exploring the relationship between trauma, comics and visual archives, before turning to contemporary analyses of trauma narratives in modern legal proceedings. Finally, close readings of comics from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries—specifically Safdar Ahmed’s “Villawood: Notes from an Immigration Detention Centre” (2015), Winsor McCay’s “Little Sammy Sneeze” (1904-06), and Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s Four Immigrants Manga (1931), demonstrate the narrative strength of the comics medium for illuminating the intersections between trauma narratives and the law. 

Law and art have enjoyed/endured a complex relationship (Douzinas and Nead 1999; Young 2004). However, there is an emerging trend within legal scholarship to explore legal themes through visual art, perhaps in recognition or reflection of the visual turn (Mulcahy 2017; Goodrich 2017; Boehme-Neßler 2010). 

In acknowledgement of the aims of the roundtable, this presentation will begin by broadly reflecting on the relationship between law and art, leading to a discussion of how the relationship has been developed in a contemporary context. Using my own research as case studies, I will share how I have conceptualised the relationship between law and art. For context, my research seeks to understand how an analysis of visual art can help engage, inform and reconceptualise legal discourse on sexual violence. 

To understand wider issues surrounding sexual violence, there has been a call for innovation (Daly 2011; Renzetti et al 2006). This call for innovation has been taken up in creative and novel scholarship that seeks to understand how law, art and sexual violence intersect. My research builds on the work of Maya- Murray (2012) and Ohana (2016) as it uses visual art to explore issues pertaining to sexual violence. 

In the hope of generating discussion and contemplation on the relationship between law and art, I will share how I have framed the relationship between law and art in my research. To do so, I will compare my earlier approach in my dissertation ‘Susanna the Slut: Depictions of Rape Victims in Law and in Art’ with my current approach in my doctoral thesis ‘Visualising Justice: Sexual Violence, Law and Art’, asking us to reflect on the question, can art work for law? 

Session Two 

Metaphor and Moral Plausibility in Legal Judgment: Constructing Culpability on Fragile Foundations? David Gurnham, University of Southampton 

The struggle for justice is commonly articulated in literature and drama through metaphors of physical encumbrance (cramped, constraining conditions, being entangled and mired) and escape (e.g. to open landscapes and a view of the horizon and sky). What is less well known or observed is that a comparable metaphorical opposition of encumbrance/escape plays an important role in legal language too. This paper traces the appearance of this metaphor across some key moments in English criminal law in which injustice is conceptualised metaphorically in terms of being held up, kept down or back, impeded, constrained or contained, and that achieving a just outcome necessitates shaking off the encumbrance and getting free. The paper argues that analysis of this metaphor establishes an important intersection between literature and law. Following a discussion of the relevant general themes, the paper offers a close reading of a number of appellate judgments on a range of criminal legal issues. Some of these judgments are very well known and concern questions such as how courts should set standards of culpability (e.g. on dishonesty and recklessness) and assess a defendant’s responsibility (e.g. the availability of ‘excusatory’ defences to murder). We will seek to throw light on the way that the metaphors of encumbrance and escape work (or in some cases fail to work) in legal language, and thereby to advance understanding of the moral intelligibility, persuasiveness and longer-term prospects of judicial rulings as authorities. 

Of Sovereigns and Giants: Children’s Literature and the Enchantment of International Law Sophie Rigney, University of Dundee 

What are the stories we are told as children about the operation of international law, and does this matter? I examine depictions of international law in children’s literature, particularly by reading Antoine Saint-Exupery’s The Little Prince, Horton Hears a Who by Dr Seuss, and Roald Dahl’s The BFG. I will argue that, from a young age, children (at least those in countries which have been imperial powers) are told a particular story about international law. International law is presented in a positive way, as ensuring safety and security. Doctrines of international law are presented uncritically. I will draw on literature from the discipline of international law to show that these stories are partial and flawed. However, I argue that these stories add to the enchantment of international law, and it is crucial that we understand how children are taught to believe in international law as a force for good. 

Session Three 

Judging from Experience: Law, Praxis, Humanities Jeanne Gaakeer, Erasmus School of Law 

My presentation will focus on the methodology for the humanistic study of law as praxis as developed in my recently published book Judging from Experience: Law, Praxis, Humanities (Edinburgh University Press 2019), and that is a methodology that I hope both students of law and professionals alike can benefit from. My book presents a view on law as a humanistic discipline that is inspired by Law and Literature’s original, European roots and it aims to offer a specific European perspective. With it I hope to demonstrate the importance for academic legal theory and legal, more specifically judicial, practice of a view on jurisprudence as a form of knowledge of law that is based on insights from philosophical hermeneutics and narratology. In doing so I engage with Anglo-American scholarship in the field. In the 1980s the Anglo-American renaissance of the humanist tradition that became Law and Literature revitalised the two early twentieth-century challenges provoked by John Wigmore and Benjamin Cardozo, i.e. that literary works can provide insight in the life of the law, and that law can be seen as a literary-linguistic practice, but it soon deviated from its original goals to provide food for thought for legal professionals. That is why I suggest that we pay careful attention to the intertwinement of theory and practice in order to develop a humanities-inspired methodology for both the academic interdisciplinary study of law and for legal practice. The building blocks that I propose for practice are also indicative of a methodological reflection on interdisciplinary legal studies in general. I combine my understanding of legal theory and my experience of judicial practice in a continental-European civil law system as senior justice in the Court of Appeal in The Hague. Thus my work is also a reflection of my combined passions of judicial practice and Law and Literature/Law and the Humanities. 

What’s in an ‘And’? The Missing Humanism in the Law of Law and Humanities Luke Mason, Birmingham City University 

This contribution interrogates the theoretical bases and methods of the increasingly discrete and identifiable ‘school’ of Law and Humanities which has emerged in English-speaking scholarship, often creating an apparent bridge between ‘analytical’ and ‘continental’ traditions of theoretical work. It is concluded that while the Law and Humanities movement is to be applauded for creating a dialogue around the metaphysically inevitable connection between law and humanistic forms of knowledge, the manner in which this body of work has emerged has in fact resulted in a rather unfortunate ‘island’ of scholarship, detached from the broader mainland of legal knowledge. In particular, it is argued that Law and Humanities has emerged as a form of identitarian and contrarian scholarship, drawing naively and derivatively upon a body of work which it tends to misapply and whose methods it does not share. Furthermore, while much Law and Humanities scholarship draws explicitly upon apparently ‘continental’ philosophy, that canon of work, while brilliant in many ways, is generally marked by an underwhelming and unsophisticated vision of law, to the great detriment of the potential of the Law and Humanities scholarship which draws upon it. This results is an impoverished understanding of law itself, thus reducing the potential of the humanities to aid our understanding of the law. The deep irony which emerges from this analysis is that, while much Law and Humanities work is an identitarian exercise in ostensibly radical academic posturing, the visions of law which are contained therein are deeply conservative in both senses of this word. They are conservative in that they tend to limit the potentialities for law to adopt certain innovative forms, and they are politically ‘Conservative’ in that they appear obsessed with the authoritative and even authoritarian nature of law, and the need to justify the exercise of State authority, and therefore have much in common with the philosophy of the earliest liberal political philosophers, who also tended to see law in this narrow sense, the very visions which the contrarian nature of Law and Humanities scholarship often seeks to refute. The paper argues that Law and Humanities would benefit from entering into methodological and substantive dialogue with mainstream legal theory, which, upon analysis, contains a great deal of overlap with the concerns of a humanistic worldview and method. Law and Humanities is a positive development within legal scholarship, but it should not develop as an island. Instead, it should be a part of the mainland of legal scholarship, playing a crucial role in understanding the cultural locatedness of law, its genesis and its social function.