This volume is a Nordic contribution to research on law and humanities. It treats the legal culture of the Nordic countries through intensive analyses of canonical Nordic artworks. Law and justice have always been important issues in Nordic literature, film and theater from the Icelandic sagas through Ludvig Holberg and Henrik Ibsen to Lars Norens theatre and Lars von Trier's Dogme films of today. This book strives to answer two fundamental questions: Is there a special Nordic justice? And what does the legal and literary/aesthetic culture of the North mean for the concept of law and...

What does it mean to be a subject of human rights? The status of the subject is closely connected with the form and rhetoric of the framing discourse, and this book investigates the relationship between the status of the subject and the form of human rights discourse, in differing aesthetic and social contexts. Historical as well as contemporary declarations of rights have stressed both the protective and political aspects of human rights. But in concrete situations and conflictual moments, the high moral legitimacy of human rights rhetoric has often clouded the actual character of...