AnteEditorial: a personal reflection on law and humanities

Abstract

At an interdisciplinary university event a few years ago, I found myself sitting beside two colleagues from Music: one of whom I knew slightly, the other I had never previously met. The colleague I had never met asked me which department I was from. ‘I’m from Law’, I said. Her response – ‘Oh – how boring!’ took me by surprise since the orthodoxy of her question had led me to assume that her response would also be blandly amiable. The event was about to start so there was no time for me to discover what exactly my new acquaintance meant by this, let alone respond adequately to it. I can only guess that for this Music scholar, the study of ‘law’ meant studying ‘rules’, and that rules are contained in tedious lists of do’s and don’ts. Stirred to say something by the personal implications that her remark carried about me, but mindful of the difficulty of refuting so firmly stated a view of law in a few moments without sounding defensive, I decided that I could defend only my own corner of it. With a silent apology to my colleagues of various other legal scholarly hues then, I mentioned that the ‘law and humanities’ approach that I use means that I get to read, not merely the legal authorities, but also all manner of interesting sources from the arts. In other words, rather than trying to refute her point, I limited my aim to pointing out a well-established figurative bridge between our respective subjects. Of course, my defence was not merely limited; it was also an act of moral cowardice or even outright betrayal, privileging the particular (me and my self-image) over the general (the character of law as a subject of study andmy colleagues), and relying on a distinction between ‘dry law’ and ‘exciting arts’ that I happen to believe to be a false and damaging stereotype. But what else could I do under those circumstances? Perhaps I would have done better had I been prepared to violate the social and professional conventions at play: that audience members stop talking when an event starts; that one should not try to impose on others the burden of being party to such a violation; that one should avoid self-defensiveness; that one should not seek to pursue a point after it has ceased to be appropriate to do so, or its resolution interesting to the other. It strikes me now that this reflection about social norms also stands as a fitting response to my Music colleague’s position, in that it illustrates that the rules that structure and constrain our behaviours are everywhere and all around, external and internal as well, and that these very often pertain to conventional expectations about the right and a wrong time to act or speak. In the common law too, we find that time is crucial to notions of authority and application – perceived continuities and discontinuities between past, present and future determine the relevance or irrelevance of events as guides for present legal questions, and the prospects that these will in turn be looked to as indicators of where we are going next. Professor David Gurnham, Southampton Law School