This chapter challenges the idea that the classical Roman jurists were “pioneers of human rights.” The jurists had no doubts about the legitimacy of the hunt for human prey in war. Quite the contrary: they thought of the capture and enslavement of enemies as a paradigm of just acquisition. It is crucial that we come to terms with this ancient belief system: We must recognize that the classical jurists did not see any need for justification for slavery beyond the fact of victory in battle or in the sack of cities. The use of theories like Aristotelean natural slavery or the teaching that slavery arose out of the consent of the victim date only to the early modern period. The chapter closes by discussing how the jurists used the model of the hunt for human and animal prey as the basis for analogical reasoning.

The corporation plays a special role in discussions over legal personhood. Whereas advocates for human rights have turned to personhood to offer protection to the vulnerable, corporate personhood confers privileges on already powerful institutions. Nonetheless, attempts to distinguish corporate persons from other persons are beset by problems. This chapter suggests that instead of trying to find the truth of persons, such that we can distinguish real flesh and blood humans from the persona ficta of the corporation, we should take seriously the fictional nature of corporate personhood. The chapter concludes by mapping out two different ways that corporate fictions operate, one in law and the other in literature.

In the early 1910s, the extension of copyright protection to moving picture adaptations of literary works resulted in the emergence of film rights, and this phenomenon had a profound effect on film production and the writing of fiction. Paramount Studios, originally the Famous Players-Lasky Corporation, became the most powerful studio of the 1910s and 1920s, in part, due to its unparalleled ability to exploit preexisting literary and dramatic properties: to produce “Famous Plays with Famous Players.” At the same time, this new regime altered the constitution of the American literary field. Authors and studios alike reflected on the importance of preparing fiction for eventual adaptation. I call the capacity for authors to imagine the afterlives of their prose works before writing the “transmedial possibility” of fiction. This possibility influenced the work of several writers who published in American modernism's great year 1925, all of whom responded in some way to Paramount: Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, John Dos Passos’s Manhattan Transfer, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

Theorizations of slavery in the Indian Ocean world often draw upon analyses of enslavement in the anglophone Black Atlantic world, productively highlighting continuities between systems of unfree labor migration across oceans. This chapter, however, focuses mainly on how enslavement in the Indian Ocean diverged from Atlantic models, and the implications this has had for the literatures of slavery. If the anglophone Black Atlantic can be considered a sphere of autobiographical speech and legal silence, the Indian Ocean world of enslavement is one of autobiographical silence, but legal speech. The rich heteroglossia of Indian Ocean legal records stands in contrast to portrayals of the Atlantic Ocean slave trade as a process of silencing and erasure. The existence of these legal records affects the representation of the enslaved in later, fictional narratives of slavery, which share an interest in voice, testimony, and the law. After a brief summary of the historical contexts of slavery in the Indian Ocean world, this chapter examines depictions of enslaved voices in legal archives and fictional works. The final section turns to literatures of indenture, a more recent form of coerced labor migration, to suggest why we should not consider indenture as simply a continuation of slavery.

This Chapter’s objective is to present Grotius’ literary writings as an integral part of his intellectual legacy and to highlight its pertinence to the understanding of his social tenets and moral programme. It addresses this objective from two perspectives, by verifying the heavy moral and political overtones of Grotius’ literary outpourings and by falsifying claims as to the irrelevance, let alone anomaly of the literary input in his legal and political writings. To prove its point, the paper establishes the programmatic overlap of both domains throughout Grotius’ life. It closely links the literary themes from his early years, whether as a playwright or historiographer, to the political bottlenecks of the Dutch Revolt and the socio-religious riddles of the Remonstrant Troubles. It underpins its thesis with reference to Grotius’ later plays on fratricide and exile as reflecting on the pits and peaks of his dramatic personal life. Finally, it identifies the intellectual epitome of Grotius’ literary outpouring in his comprehensive programme to salvage the Greek literary tradition in the social maelstrom of his times, a fitting counterpart to his ambitions to lay down a legal framework of universal appliance and a creed to serve all Christian denominations.

The book begins with a broad introduction situating the development of colonial law alongside the rise of the novel. The introduction offers an overview of the architecture of colonial sovereignty while also delving into its specifically legal context. From the move toward the codification of laws to the adjudication of cases in the Privy Council, the introduction reveals the ways in which the law provided a narrative for colonial lives. At the same time, the introduction shows how broader cultural narratives as represented in the era’s literature influenced the law. Even if, as is customarily claimed, the substance of law in the colonies was haphazard and drawn from multiple legal traditions, its authority was largely founded in claims to absolute sovereignty. The introduction frames the ways in which bloodline claims to the sovereignty of kingship were reconfigured in the colonies to enact a biopolitical sovereignty of race.

Though legal plots are a common feature of the nineteenth-century European novel, the massive legal changes brought about by the French Revolution made law a uniquely important theme of French fiction, and changed the way novelists made use of it. In the early part of the century, Romantic novelists’ meditations on law, such as those of Mme de Staël, reflected their eighteenth-century intellectual inheritance, in attempting to understand if and how individual happiness and social duty could be reconciled by enlightened legal reform. Yet later novelists abandoned such utopian abstractions, to see in law the very epitome of the ‘realist’ view of the world that ultimately gave them their name: law, novelists such as Honoré de Balzac suggest, is about compromise with imperfect systems, the balancing of competing interests, and the operation of power—it is, in short, political. To learn the law, as so many nineteenth-century heroes set out to do, is thus to learn ‘the way of the world’. Finally, however, nineteenth-century novelists saw in the language of the law (and especially the Civil Code of 1804) a model for, and indeed a rival to, their own task: to build worlds in words, to speak ideas into being.

From the eighteenth century, Indigenous women have produced texts in English that reflect and re-inscribe Indigenous principles of law and social order, as well as challenge the force of settler colonial law. Native women writers have made visible the burdens and structures of violence that make Indigenous women and children particularly vulnerable to state disciplinary power (such as public execution, military warfare, massacres, state-sanctioned starvation, and the removal of indigenous children from their families) and extra-judicial violence (land theft, fraud, murder, rape). This essay reviews major works and criticism, organized in three overlapping categories: writing about the law and criminality; writing about prison and carcerality; and writing Indigenous law. These writers mastered new languages and genres to assert Native rights and make legible multiple forms of violence against Native communities. Across time and circumstance, Native women’s writing has had very little distance from the law, or from the law’s claim over their bodies, families, and futures.

This chapter reflects on the implications of censorship for writers working after 1940, first, by questioning the extent to which its imposition hampered the expression of a modern literary generation, and second, by exploring the strategies through which it was sidestepped and transgressed by both writers and readers in this period. It considers both the cultural implications of domestic censorship for Irish writers between 1940 and 1980, and the means that existed for circumventing the policing of ‘foreign’ literature. It highlights the pervasive effects of censorship across the middle decades of the century. First, the focus is on Kate O’Brien, Seán O’Faoláin and Frank O’Connor, all born before independence, who found themselves directly at odds with the country they had seen created. Faced with the banning of their own books, they battled to resist official strictures of their work. It then considers a subsequent generation of writers – including Edna O’Brien, Leland Bardwell, John Montague, John McGahern and Julia O’Faoláin – born during a period in which censorship had already become embedded within Irish literary culture. Finally, this chapter concludes by examining the experience of Colm Tóibín, who grew up in the 1950s, when censorship was still a dominant force.

This chapter explores Le Carrç's novels as a means through which a pecularly British view of Cold War legalities might be explored or examined. It is argued that Le Carrç evokes in his novels an account of British moral confusion and psychological disintegration that were induced, in part, by a decline in its international political standing and its inability to sustain a coherent international normative vision. As a consequence, it was unable to uphold the international law of the Atlantic Charter and the UN Charter.

This chapter looks at two nexuses: law-and-literature and human-rights-and-literature. In her analysis of Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Testimony: the United States (1885-1915): Recitative (1978), the author brings the law-and-literature paradigm to bear on literary expression of human rights. She finds in the text overlapping ideations of the procedural and the performative, in its juridical and literary dimensions. On the one hand, the text serves to show the limitations of the law and its technologies such as the trial, which literary performance can help compensate for. On the other hand, Reznikoff's poem also proves the necessity for these technologies as organizing principles, especially in methods like citation and precedent, in order to battle the ever present risk of erasure.

This chapter looks at two nexuses: law-and-literature and human-rights-and-literature. In her analysis of Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem Testimony: the United States (1885-1915): Recitative (1978), the author brings the law-and-literature paradigm to bear on literary expression of human rights. She finds in the text overlapping ideations of the procedural and the performative, in its juridical and literary dimensions. On the one hand, the text serves to show the limitations of the law and its technologies such as the trial, which literary performance can help compensate for. On the other hand, Reznikoff's poem also proves the necessity for these technologies as organizing principles, especially in methods like citation and precedent, in order to battle the ever present risk of erasure.

This chapter considers how forms of narrative literature, particularly life-writing, serve as technologies in the making of the modern personhood that in turn anchor contemporary human rights. Drawing from Benveniste’s work on the relationship between grammatical personhood and subjectivity, the chapter is structured into “gradations” of personhood, examining their implications on human rights discourse and its subjects. The first-person form common to life-writing, with its centering of the speakerly “I,” operates in the ethical domain of sentiment and empathy; whereas the second-person form of the testimony, with it’s construction of an “I-you,” depends more on a process of interpellation than empathizing. Meanwhile, the third-person form, which may seem less relevant to human rights discourse, provides insight into the ways in which collective bodies, such as corporations, lay claim to human rights. The chapter closes with a reflection on posthumanism and the zero-person or non-human as a potential departure point for probing the limits of the human subject that underlies human rights discourse.