Law and Imagination in Troubled Times : A Legal and Literary Discourse.
- 1st ed.
- 1 online resource (283 pages)
- Law, Language and Communication Series .
- Law, Language and Communication Series .
Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Table of Contents -- List of figures -- List of contributors -- 1. Legal imagination in troubled times: An introduction -- PART ONE: Imagination, law, and history: framing the future -- 2. The progress of legal education in England -- 3. The dragon in the cave: Fleta as a legal imagining of early English common law -- 4. The apotheosis of King Charles I -- PART TWO: The courts and the legal imagination -- 5. Pathologies of imagination and legitimacy of judicial decision-making -- 6. Law and belief: The reality of judicial interpretation -- 7. Legal imagination or an extra-legal hoax: On storytelling, friends of the court, and crossing legal boundaries in the US Supreme Court -- PART THREE: Thought, stylistics, and discourse -- 8. The French Revolution and the programmatic imagination: Hilary Mantel on law, politics, and misery -- 9. Internal coherence and the possibility of judicial integrity -- 10. Legal humanism: 'Stylistic imagination' and the making of legal traditions -- PART FOUR: The future of the legal imagination -- 11. Depicting the end of the American frontier: Some thoughts on Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove series -- 12. A Coleridgean dystopia: Formalism and the optics of judgment -- 13. Against the failure of the legal imagination: Literary narratives, Brexit, and the fate of the Anglo-British constitution -- Index.
This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the 'legal imagination'.