Pub Date : 2019-12-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.43
Hillary L. Chute
The art form of comics has been at center of heated global free speech debates, which remain among the defining issues of our time, particularly as they map onto cultural and religious difference. In the past ten years, the hybrid word-and-image medium of comics has also entered the legal arena through comics-form amicus briefs and comics-form contracts, to name a few examples. The examples suggest that comics is understood today not only as a medium with the potential to be sophisticated, literary, and entertaining but further as one with the concision and clarity that legal discourse values. The growing international energy around the intersection of comics and law, evident in the emergence of comics-form documents and comics as a mode of legal pedagogy, is also reflected in the academy, where there has been a large recent increase in legal academic attention to comics. Other comics genres, particularly nonfiction genres (e.g., comics journalism and graphic memoir), have also proven to be richly engaged with the juridical. Comics that address complicated ethical and material realities through content and form alike model productive ways of engaging with aesthetics and the juridical imaginary, including compelling but fraught legal discourses like that of human rights. This chapter focuses in particular on the non-fiction work of Malta-born cartoonist Joe Sacco, suggesting that Sacco, perhaps more than any other cartoonist, helps readers to see how the comics form can reveal the law-driven focus on “rights” differently than in traditional accounts, especially through the medium’s approach to layered temporalities.
{"title":"Comics","authors":"Hillary L. Chute","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.43","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.43","url":null,"abstract":"The art form of comics has been at center of heated global free speech debates, which remain among the defining issues of our time, particularly as they map onto cultural and religious difference. In the past ten years, the hybrid word-and-image medium of comics has also entered the legal arena through comics-form amicus briefs and comics-form contracts, to name a few examples. The examples suggest that comics is understood today not only as a medium with the potential to be sophisticated, literary, and entertaining but further as one with the concision and clarity that legal discourse values. The growing international energy around the intersection of comics and law, evident in the emergence of comics-form documents and comics as a mode of legal pedagogy, is also reflected in the academy, where there has been a large recent increase in legal academic attention to comics. Other comics genres, particularly nonfiction genres (e.g., comics journalism and graphic memoir), have also proven to be richly engaged with the juridical. Comics that address complicated ethical and material realities through content and form alike model productive ways of engaging with aesthetics and the juridical imaginary, including compelling but fraught legal discourses like that of human rights. This chapter focuses in particular on the non-fiction work of Malta-born cartoonist Joe Sacco, suggesting that Sacco, perhaps more than any other cartoonist, helps readers to see how the comics form can reveal the law-driven focus on “rights” differently than in traditional accounts, especially through the medium’s approach to layered temporalities.","PeriodicalId":348365,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"125177942","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.1
Stephen Robertson
Legal scholarship has its own distinctive place in the different disciplinary responses to digital humanities. It has long relied on databases of digitized sources and consequently on search as a research methodology. Computational tools provide means of addressing the limitations of search. This chapter surveys the use of computational tools to identify patterns of word use and borrowing and the diffusion of concepts in legal texts, to construct networks of relationships in texts and between individuals, to visualize spatial information, and to create 3D models of objects and structure as methods for both discovery and interpretation. These digital methods raise epistemological questions about how to address different questions and various kinds of sources, and what evidence is needed to support particular claims. Computational analysis expands the scale of the analysis, and the level of detail and context, making it possible to systematically explore claims about what is typical and representative and the periodization of historical discourses. Network graphs and maps visualize and measure relationships and spatial patterns in ways that capture a degree of complexity beyond what can be rendered in narrative. The implication of digital humanities for all humanities scholars is that we must look anew at our practices of research and analysis and critically reevaluate the nature and scope of the interpretative claims that we make.
{"title":"Digital Humanities","authors":"Stephen Robertson","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.1","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.1","url":null,"abstract":"Legal scholarship has its own distinctive place in the different disciplinary responses to digital humanities. It has long relied on databases of digitized sources and consequently on search as a research methodology. Computational tools provide means of addressing the limitations of search. This chapter surveys the use of computational tools to identify patterns of word use and borrowing and the diffusion of concepts in legal texts, to construct networks of relationships in texts and between individuals, to visualize spatial information, and to create 3D models of objects and structure as methods for both discovery and interpretation. These digital methods raise epistemological questions about how to address different questions and various kinds of sources, and what evidence is needed to support particular claims. Computational analysis expands the scale of the analysis, and the level of detail and context, making it possible to systematically explore claims about what is typical and representative and the periodization of historical discourses. Network graphs and maps visualize and measure relationships and spatial patterns in ways that capture a degree of complexity beyond what can be rendered in narrative. The implication of digital humanities for all humanities scholars is that we must look anew at our practices of research and analysis and critically reevaluate the nature and scope of the interpretative claims that we make.","PeriodicalId":348365,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133984507","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.46
J. Simon-Kerr
The project of evidence law is in many ways analogous to that of the author or artist. All seek to expose deeper truths. While the novelist can freely invent character and corresponding behavior, evidence law uses fictive devices to recreate a coherent narrative from ostensibly unimagined facts. It does this, in part, by structuring the ways in which we assess witness credibility. What witnesses say is at the heart of most trials and whether to believe those witnesses is an overarching concern. The novelist or painter can show us the inner life of characters through an omniscient narrator or a telltale blush. Evidence law employs a different, though no less evocative, means for signaling credibility. It makes otherwise irrelevant information admissible at trial as credibility evidence, encouraging fact-finders to consider the kind of person whose word they are being asked to accept by digging into that person’s past. In admitting this evidence, the law relies on a false equivalence between a propensity to lie, which will allegedly be uncovered through credibility evidence, and evidence tailored to the question of whether a witness should be believed, which is what is actually being offered to the fact-finder. This chapter seeks to disentangle the two concepts—propensity to lie and worthiness of belief—and in so doing to reveal the danger in mistaking a fundamentally authorial impulse to use worthiness and status-based distinctions to color in the narratives of the courtroom in service of a hyper-rational process of proof.
{"title":"Uncovering Credibility","authors":"J. Simon-Kerr","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.46","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.46","url":null,"abstract":"The project of evidence law is in many ways analogous to that of the author or artist. All seek to expose deeper truths. While the novelist can freely invent character and corresponding behavior, evidence law uses fictive devices to recreate a coherent narrative from ostensibly unimagined facts. It does this, in part, by structuring the ways in which we assess witness credibility. What witnesses say is at the heart of most trials and whether to believe those witnesses is an overarching concern. The novelist or painter can show us the inner life of characters through an omniscient narrator or a telltale blush. Evidence law employs a different, though no less evocative, means for signaling credibility. It makes otherwise irrelevant information admissible at trial as credibility evidence, encouraging fact-finders to consider the kind of person whose word they are being asked to accept by digging into that person’s past. In admitting this evidence, the law relies on a false equivalence between a propensity to lie, which will allegedly be uncovered through credibility evidence, and evidence tailored to the question of whether a witness should be believed, which is what is actually being offered to the fact-finder. This chapter seeks to disentangle the two concepts—propensity to lie and worthiness of belief—and in so doing to reveal the danger in mistaking a fundamentally authorial impulse to use worthiness and status-based distinctions to color in the narratives of the courtroom in service of a hyper-rational process of proof.","PeriodicalId":348365,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130576710","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.39
Tal Kastner
In light of the tendency to view contract through a lens of free will and agreement, this chapter approaches contract from the vantage point of standard form agreements. Drawing on empirical studies, behavioral psychology, law and economics contract scholarship, critical legal studies, legal history, and literary theory, it counters the prevailing view of standard terms as the exceptional case of contract. Through the lens of deconstruction, the chapter highlights the contextual contingency of standard form and refracts the presumptions in society and law concerning the allocation of resources. It identifies how the contemporary proliferation and routine enforcement of ancillary terms such as arbitration provisions in the current day epitomize how contract serves as a tool to leverage power. Examining form-contract scholarship and case law, the chapter reveals the expressive possibility of standard form in American law. It shows how the phenomenon of boilerplate exemplifies the process by which contract language serves to manifest agreement, shaping an understanding of freedom. The chapter extends the insights of legal history concerning the limits of contract freedom in the nineteenth century. In doing so, it draws on American literature to illustrate a changing paradigm of freedom—from wage labor to real estate development to consumption—and the attendant allocation of resources that shape voluntary exchange. By virtue of boilerplate’s contextual contingency, this deconstructive perspective reveals the potential to redistribute resources through standard form contract, and thereby not only create value but shape social norms.
{"title":"Form Contract","authors":"Tal Kastner","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.39","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.39","url":null,"abstract":"In light of the tendency to view contract through a lens of free will and agreement, this chapter approaches contract from the vantage point of standard form agreements. Drawing on empirical studies, behavioral psychology, law and economics contract scholarship, critical legal studies, legal history, and literary theory, it counters the prevailing view of standard terms as the exceptional case of contract. Through the lens of deconstruction, the chapter highlights the contextual contingency of standard form and refracts the presumptions in society and law concerning the allocation of resources. It identifies how the contemporary proliferation and routine enforcement of ancillary terms such as arbitration provisions in the current day epitomize how contract serves as a tool to leverage power. Examining form-contract scholarship and case law, the chapter reveals the expressive possibility of standard form in American law. It shows how the phenomenon of boilerplate exemplifies the process by which contract language serves to manifest agreement, shaping an understanding of freedom. The chapter extends the insights of legal history concerning the limits of contract freedom in the nineteenth century. In doing so, it draws on American literature to illustrate a changing paradigm of freedom—from wage labor to real estate development to consumption—and the attendant allocation of resources that shape voluntary exchange. By virtue of boilerplate’s contextual contingency, this deconstructive perspective reveals the potential to redistribute resources through standard form contract, and thereby not only create value but shape social norms.","PeriodicalId":348365,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities","volume":"13 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"124554475","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.27
Gregory Ablavsky, Sarah Deer, Justin Richland
Indigenous law is the category applied to the norms and legally binding practices of thousands of distinct indigenous communities spanning six continents. This chapter focuses on the content and construction of indigenous law within the borders of the present-day United States, equally marked by diversity among Native communities. Nonetheless, it identifies several important ways in which indigenous law broadly construed diverges from Euro-American legal systems. The chapter notes that indigenous communities have not drawn sharp distinctions between law and other methods for maintaining the proper ordering of society. And, while cautioning against essential accounts of Native justice, it also observes the ways in which Native dispute resolution focuses more on community and restoration than Anglo-American adversarial models. The chapter also recounts constructions of indigenous law by North America’s would-be European colonizers. It describes the long-standing practice by many colonizers of describing indigenous peoples as lawless. This language, the chapter argues, did important work in justifying colonization and the imposition of Anglo-American law. But it also traces the ways in which Native peoples forced Anglo-Americans to incorporate indigenous laws into US law. This incorporation happened both informally—as Anglo-Americans negotiating with Native nations adopted their rules to govern negotiations—and formally, as the body of law known as federal Indian law created a regime of legal pluralism that granted limited recognition to Native nations’ assertions of jurisdiction. The chapter concludes by noting the dangers of adopting the colonizers’ frame and defining indigenous law principally as a foil for Anglo-American law.
{"title":"Indigenous Law","authors":"Gregory Ablavsky, Sarah Deer, Justin Richland","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.27","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.27","url":null,"abstract":"Indigenous law is the category applied to the norms and legally binding practices of thousands of distinct indigenous communities spanning six continents. This chapter focuses on the content and construction of indigenous law within the borders of the present-day United States, equally marked by diversity among Native communities. Nonetheless, it identifies several important ways in which indigenous law broadly construed diverges from Euro-American legal systems. The chapter notes that indigenous communities have not drawn sharp distinctions between law and other methods for maintaining the proper ordering of society. And, while cautioning against essential accounts of Native justice, it also observes the ways in which Native dispute resolution focuses more on community and restoration than Anglo-American adversarial models. The chapter also recounts constructions of indigenous law by North America’s would-be European colonizers. It describes the long-standing practice by many colonizers of describing indigenous peoples as lawless. This language, the chapter argues, did important work in justifying colonization and the imposition of Anglo-American law. But it also traces the ways in which Native peoples forced Anglo-Americans to incorporate indigenous laws into US law. This incorporation happened both informally—as Anglo-Americans negotiating with Native nations adopted their rules to govern negotiations—and formally, as the body of law known as federal Indian law created a regime of legal pluralism that granted limited recognition to Native nations’ assertions of jurisdiction. The chapter concludes by noting the dangers of adopting the colonizers’ frame and defining indigenous law principally as a foil for Anglo-American law.","PeriodicalId":348365,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities","volume":"59 4 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128343484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2019-12-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.9
Hyo Yoon Kang, S. Kendall
This chapter presents legal materiality as a distinct approach within law and humanities scholarship. Legal materiality is concerned with the conditions of possibility in and through which law arises, rather than taking law’s materiality to be self-evident, as when it is regarded as a form of material culture or when objects are taken as symbols of law. It distinguishes between matters and materials: if matters are problematizations or “matters of concern” to law, materials are the attributes or properties that are enlisted in acts of interpretation. Rather than addressing materials as inert physical elements that are acted upon by law, legal materiality is concerned with how materials come to matter by being engaged in the production of legal meaning through interpretive and representational practices. Section 2.2 situates this approach in relation to a broader inheritance of materialism and materiality in the Western tradition. It considers different understandings of “materialism,” such as “new materialisms” and historical materialism, that inform but also diverge from legal materiality. Section 2.3 engages with different uses of “materiality” in recent legal scholarship, followed by a detailed discussion of its meaning in two works of legal theory that have sought to articulate a conception of legal materiality. The concluding section discusses the potentials of this approach for law and humanities scholarship to understand how materials are directly implicated in the making of legal difference rather than serving solely as law’s objects.
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Pub Date : 2019-12-12DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.18
S. Mukherji
Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.
近代早期英国的法律与文学想象在表象与意图、表面与意义、真实与表象、自然与技巧之间的关系上有着共同的利害关系。本章以精通法律的剧作家约翰·韦伯斯特(John Webster)的《白魔鬼》(the White Devil)为中心，探讨法律对易读性的关注，以及戏剧与之对话的方式。在这一过程中，法律成为表达模式和解释学模式之间的界面，从而成为对自我和内在感兴趣的文学作家的想象资源。最后，本文揭示了早期现代戏剧实践如何利用戏剧与法律之间相互关系的差距和二元性来概念化文学与法律认识论之间更大的相互关系。
{"title":"Facing Justice","authors":"S. Mukherji","doi":"10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780190695620.013.18","url":null,"abstract":"Law and the literary imagination in early modern England had shared stakes in the relation between face and intent, surface and significance, truth and semblance, nature and artifice. Using the legally attuned dramatist John Webster’s The White Devil as its central example, this chapter probes law’s preoccupation with legibility and the way in which drama enters into dialogue with it. In the process, law emerges an interface between an expressive mode and a hermeneutic model, and thus an imaginative resource for literary writers interested in selfhood and inwardness. Ultimately, the argument intimates how the gaps and dualities of the interrelation between the theatre and the law are used by early modern dramatic practice to conceptualize the larger interrelation between literary and legal epistemologies.","PeriodicalId":348365,"journal":{"name":"The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities","volume":"34 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-12-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"121861036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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