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What literary conventions best help us understand the migrant refugee's claim for protection, and the terms on which law claims to offer it? One contender to have attracted attention recently is "bildungsroman" ("formation novel"), since the narrative of the refugee escaping danger and oppression to find safety and stability within a host state arguably maps onto bilgungsroman's themes of a protagonist's difficult personal journey from margins to social acceptance and flourishing. However, this view is now seriously undermined by legislative initiatives in the UK aimed at ensuring migrant refugees who cross the English Channel in small boats should have no cause to hope for such a happy ending. By way of a close reading of the narrative implications of these initiatives, this article proposes a thorough rethink of our approach to figuring the irregular migrant refugee. Rejecting bildungsroman as now implausibly optimistic, the article suggests we look instead to the ghost, whose "presence" is typically the chief problem for those to whom it appears, whose "shape" is uncertain, and whose complaints and demands inspire dread and strenuous efforts to make it disappear. The article employs these conventions to draw a new relationship between refugee migration law and the arts, and argues that if the UK's policies for "stopping the boats" may be characterized as an attempt to effect such a disappearance, then the migrant refugee's reappearance in visual art offers a ghostly figuration of resistance and of admonishment at injustice unredressed and obligations unfulfilled. The article traces these qualities and explores their critical potential through two recent works of visual art, namely "The Walk" (2021–22) and Gideon Mendel's "Dzhangal" ["Jungle"] (2016–17). Both of these works admit of multiple readings, but both also crucially resist the punitive and reductive framing of migrants in law in some surprising ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The editorial in Law & Humanities discusses recent events exploring intersections between law, humanities, and the arts, particularly focusing on Kafka's influence on legal scholarship and practice. The article highlights discussions on Kafka's works, with a focus on "The Trial" and "The Castle," while noting the lack of engagement with "Amerika" among legal scholars. Additionally, the editorial touches on Kafka's shorter fiction and its metaphorical interpretations related to legal subjectivity. The issue also includes reviews of arts productions and books, showcasing diverse perspectives on law and literature. [Extracted from the article]

Although Covid-19 has been framed using all manner of metaphors, an as-yet under-examined question is how the spreading virus might itself serve as a metaphor and what purpose this might serve. The article redresses this deficit by identifying shared experiences of the mobile virus as the basis for a metaphorical framework for evaluating and judging human behavior, including alleged rule-breaking, during the pandemic. The article traces the appearance of the metaphor spreading across a broad spectrum of sources that includes political speech, the reporting of crime in prosecutorial and local media sources, judicial opinion and poetry. We observe in some limited contexts a straightforward metaphoric transfer or substitution between mobile people and the mobile virus. In a greater number and variety contexts, we find instead more subtle signs of the metaphor: the censuring of bad behavior and the justifying of coercive treatment using the metonymic elements of viral spread: its characteristic unpredictability, speed, agility, irrepressibility, and relentlessness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea that there is an "art of law" and, perhaps more contentiously, a "law of art", is not in itself new. With a silent apology to my colleagues of various other legal scholarly hues then, I mentioned that the "law and humanities" approach that I I i use means that I get to read, not merely the legal authorities, but also all manner of interesting sources from the arts. The symposium features five fascinating articles authored by scholars and artists and is headed with an essay of introduction by Finchett-Maddock and Tan. [Extracted from the article]

Like almost all meetings to have taken place since the onset of COVID-19, the I Law and Humanities i roundtable of July 2020 took place online - this fact taking on some significance given that the focus was to be the role and function of the I senses i with regard to the making, interpreting, living and critiquing of law. One particularly interesting aspect both of Belor and Peters' article on I The Punisher i and also Marcel's on I Oedipus i is their respective exploration of the ways in which different approaches to responding to crime conceive of a penetration, not just of violence into law, but also I law into violence i . In the traditional five acts then, the five articles in this issue of I Law and Humanities i explore the interpenetrations of law and violence, crime and punishment as they play out in political rhetoric, popular culture, contemporary and ancient drama and legal narrative. [Extracted from the article]

This issue is the first to follow the inaugural I Law and Humanities i annual workshop, capably co-organised by Thom Giddens (University of Dundee) and Gary Watt at Warwick Law School, and featuring five paper presentations: Sophie Doherty (Durham University) on imaging sexual violence in modern and classical art; Jeanne Gaakeer (Erasmus School of Law) on judging and gender and her own experiences as a Senior Justice in the criminal law section of the Appellate Court of The Hague in the Netherlands; David Gurnham (University of Southampton) on the metaphors in criminal law and literature; Golnar Nabizadeh (University of Dundee) on narrating trauma in legal proceedings in graphic novels and cartoons; and Sophie Rigney (University of Dundee) on international law in children's literature. For Schmidt, the apparent acceptability of heroic defiance of law (Pindar holding back on his criticism of Heracles, the latter being a favoured son of Zeus) proves that sovereign I order i precedes both law and justice. These lines for Young frame the central theme of Wallace's novel as the necessity to account for oneself and the authority of the ghostly father that imposes his law from beyond the grave. [Extracted from the article]

Struggles for justice are commonly articulated in literature and drama through metaphors of physical encumbrance (of being cramped, constrained, entangled and mired) and escape (to open landscapes and a view of the horizon and sky). What is less well known or observed is that this metaphorical opposition of encumbrance/escape plays an important role in legal language too. This article traces the appearance of this metaphor across some key moments in English criminal law in which injustice is conceptualized metaphorically in terms of being held up, kept down or back, etc. and that achieving a just outcome necessitates shaking off the encumbrance and getting free. Through a close reading of some important legal judgments, it shows how establishing this intersection between law and literature helps to advance our understanding of the plausibility and persuasiveness of legal language. The article applies this insight to producing a new reading of the Supreme Court's recent reworking of dishonesty in Ivey v Genting Casinos [2017] SC 67, as well as a novel re-examination of established and apparently familiar authorities on recklessness and excuses to murder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special section of Law and Humanities focuses on the 45th anniversary edition of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination: a book that was ground-breaking when it first appeared in 1973 (since it is generally credited as having initiated the 'law and literature' movement) and that remains a hugely important resource today. White's approach to legal scholarship and education - reading law's instruments, its rhetoric and concepts alongside, above, below and in-between literary works and criticism - opened up a new world of intellectual possibilities. Realization of these possibilities has come in the form of the growth and flourishing, not only of law and literature but also numerous other intersections of law and the humanities that owe a debt to White. This symposium brings together seven eminent scholars (and readers of The Legal Imagination) to reflect on the contribution that White's book made and continues to make to law and humanities education and scholarship. In the order that their essays appear, the authors for this symposium are Elizabeth Mertz, Robert P. Burns, Matthew Anderson, Jack L. Sammons, Thomas D. Eisele, Linda L. Berger and Linda Ross Meyer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including book reviews, property rights and cultural forms.

An introduction to this issue of the journal is presented which discusses the author's experience of working as a co-editor of 'Law and Humanities' along with Paul Raffield, the death of musician David Bowie, and an article on trial by ordeal.

The article focuses on the government regulations regarding the artificial reproductive treatment with respect to the rights and welfare interests of children in Great Britain. The Human Fertilisation and Embryology Act 1990 of Great Britain was enacted for balancing the legal and ethical interests of parents and children. Information on the role of the European Convention on Human Rights and the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child regarding the issue is also presented.

This article focuses on the critique and re-assessment of postmodern metaphors of death and mourning. Assessment of the relation between law and ethics; Evaluation of the structures of political power; Analysis of the alternative approach to engaging deconstructively with notions of justice.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including Jean-Philippe Strassen’s graphic novel, Deogratias on genocide; discussions on the 2013 blockbuster film World War Z; and the social and political conditions of the refugees.