Sensing Justice examines the aesthetic frames that mediate the sensory perception and signification of law and justice in the context of twenty-first-century Spain. What senses do these frames privilege or downgrade? What kind of subjects do they show, construct, and address? What kind of affective and ethical responses do they invite? What kind of judgments do they invite? The book addresses these questions by moving away from the focus on narrative and through a close analysis of selected contemporary Spanish films such as Pan's Labyrinth, High Heels, Common Wealth, The Method, No Rest for...

Through interdisciplinary readings of a range of literary and legal texts across a 200-year period, this book uncovers the connections between the individual and collective memories of law and crime that affected the development of the law itself. It draws on 3 case studies adultery, child criminality and rape testimony that demonstrate the impact of cultural narrative on legal development in the 18th and 19th centuries. Erin Sheley shows how the symbolic relationship between adultery and threatened English sovereignty created a quasi-criminal legal discourse surrounding the private wrong...

Imagined States' examines representations of the law in British and Nigerian high-brow, middle-brow and popular fiction and journalism. Drawing on a rich range of examples, the book focuses on the imaginative role that the state of exception played in the application of indirect rule during British colonialism and in the legal machinations of the postcolonial state. Discussion includes works by Chinua Achebe, Joyce Cary, Cyprian Ekwensi and Edgar Wallace, as well as a range of Nigerian market literature and journalism from between 1900 and 1966.

Outlawry and espionage would seem to be quite different phenomena, rarely discussed together, but this book shows that they have something in common - both involve exclusion from law. Challenging previous readings that view outlawry as a now-superseded historical phenomenon, and outlaws as figures of popular resistance, Conor McCarthy argues that legal exclusion is a longstanding and enduring means of supporting state power. Through close analysis of the literatures of outlawry and espionage, this book shows the important role of literature in representing and critiquing exclusion from law....

This book is a study of the critical history of space, and the ways in which a dominant property ideology has entrenched an exclusionary and profoundly alienating version of spatial ordering. It focuses on select periods in time, when the seemingly linear trajectory of enclosure momentarily wavers and alternate spatial paths briefly materialize, before 'disappearing' from plain sight. Using the forest as a thematic device, Clark and Page explore the tensions that pervade our propertied relationships; between commodity and community, abstraction and context, and private enclosure and the...