Editorial

Abstract

It is always a pleasure when writing these editorials to reflect on the contents of an issue and to marvel at the wide cast of the law and humanities net in terms both of geography and of scholarly subject matter. Few legal journals can claim, we think, to have such a broad diversity of contributions as this one. It is a claim amply borne out by the present issue. In addition to Marie-Catherine Petersmann’s review of Frédéric Neyrat’s, The Unconstructable Earth: An Ecology of Separation (2018), this issue contains five full-length articles. What follows is a brief overview, which, in accordance with time-honoured theatrical tradition, introduces the articles in order of appearance. In fact, the phrase ‘running order’ is apt to describe the sequence of the five articles that make up the bulk of this issue. ‘Order’, because the one thing that certainly connects them to each other is concern for ‘law’ broadly conceived. ‘Running’, because the course of the articles takes us from two that are concerned with law and literature – the first law as literature, the second law through a literary lens – to a piece engaged with the photographic lens, to another on the cinematic moving image, to another on law and dance. The running order therefore runs through forms of order ranging from inscribed code to the static image to the moving image and finally to bodily kinesthetics. Stability is an attribute traditionally associated with government, but talk of ‘running’ a country is a clue to other attributes at play – attributes of motion, emotion, and change. ‘Change and the Law’ is in fact the theme of the annual Law and Humanities Roundtable for Summer 2021. We are pleased to say that the final article in the present issue – Sean Mulcahy’s ‘Dances with Laws’ – was first presented at last year’s Law and Humanities Roundtable. In this issue, as in all issues of this journal, our contributors show us that concerns for law’s wider cultural impact and cultural expression run deep in the long running history of law and society. The course of the present issue is wide-ranging not only in terms of the sorts of cultural works that are engaged with, but also wide-ranging through time and space. We visit the Anglo-Saxon kingdom of England; India in the shadow of the Bhopal disaster; Poland in the shadow of Nazi war crimes; and, bringing us right up to date, we visit Hong Kong’s Storm series of films, and popular UK television show Strictly Come Dancing. We begin with Anya Adair, an Assistant Professor in Law and Humanities at the University of Hong Kong, who teaches courses in the Faculty of Law as well as in the School of English. Her article ‘Narratives of authority: the earliest Old English law-code prefaces’, examines the introductions to the earliest surviving English