Editorial

Abstract

This issue starts and finishes with Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure – a play of unerring prescience and one which foregrounds the two broad themes of the articles: the performance of justice and injustice, and the question of belonging when institutional and personal identities fail to align. These themes are themselves timely given that this issue went to press at the end of a summer dominated by the fall of the US-backed government in Kabul: an event leaving many thousands with an uncertain future in a country suddenly and once again subject to the repressive and puritanical policies of the Taliban, and effectively dashing the hope that women and girls might participate in public life. The theme of the sometimes disorienting and fearful experience of change was also the theme of the third Law and Humanities Roundtable in June 2021. That event, (‘Change and the law: hope, opportunity, shock and dread’) held online for the second time due to the ongoing pandemic, featured four fascinating paper presentations: Kamil Zeidler and Aleksandra Szydzik (Faculty of Law and Administration, University of Gdańsk), Aesthetics of Law: Does the Beauty of Law Play any Role During Times of Pandemic?; Dorothea Endres (Graduate Institute, Geneva), Norm-knitting; Lorna Cameron (The School of Architecture & Design, University of Lincoln), Change, Opportunity, and Court Systems: Exploring Access, Architecture, and Aspirations in a Post Covid-19 Future; and Guilherme Vasconcelos Vilaça (Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México), The Role of Myth in Legal Change.We are delighted to be able to offer this platform for law and humanities scholars from all over the world to share and exchange new ideas and lines of inquiry. A call for papers for the July 2022 Roundtable was circulated in November 2021 (on the journal’s website and on twitter @law_humanities) and abstract proposals for law and humanities paper presentations on Time and Temporalities are welcome (deadline Feb 4th 2022). So to the articles of this issue. In ‘Representing victims and offenders in contemporary performance: the ideal and the complex in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure’, Amanda Finch focuses on how Josie Rourke’s recent production calls attention to how gendered scripts for victims and perpetrators condition our readings of performances of sexual coercion, by ‘flipping’ the roles halfway through, such that the play’s traditional depiction of male heterosexual coercion (by the cruel Deputy Angelo of the chaste Isabella) and a self-defensive bed-trick by the female victim is reversed. The outcome of this reversal, both in Rourke’s production, and in Finch’s article, is far from a ‘mirror’ image. Finch’s article argues that women are victimized both in the traditional ‘ideal victim’ role that we are used to finding Isabella in, and in the ‘complex offender’ role traditionally given to Angelo. For Finch, the ostensibly dominant and controlling ‘Isabella 2’