Alexandra Juster – författare

Based on the long-established American law and literature movement, the interdisciplinary research field of 'law and literature' is also beginning to hesitantly establish itself in Europe. The German Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1385 ‘Law and Literature’ has provided an important impetus for this development. The present work builds on the latter and aims to develop a contrastive interdisciplinary research method ('legal counterfactual') that claims to offer a methodological basis for the further development of the young research field of 'law and literature'. The particular focus herein is on law in literature. An overview of the heterogeneous research approaches in Italy, France, Belgium, and Germany is first provided. Thereafter, the focus shifts to a theoretical examination of the methodological concepts of interdisciplinarity and counterfactuality on the one hand, and the specific approaches to the text – namely discourse and hermeneutics – on the other. Based on these theoretical 'building blocks', the dividing lines between legal and literary studies are drawn in the first step, to identify the resulting intersections in the second step: the written text as a common working basis on the one hand, and hermeneutics and discourse as a means of analysing texts on the other. The legal discourse in the texts is methodically extracted and contrasted with the real-world legal texts in a juxtaposing manner. The aim of this counterfactual contrast is to determine the degree of correspondence between diegetic and real law. To consolidate this method of legal counterfactuals, five works of contemporary literature are tested and demonstrated in practice: La décision (2022) by Karine Tuil, Sworn Virgin (2014) by Elvira Dones, Unorthodox (2012) by Deborah Feldman, Repenti (2017) by Claude Chossat, and A Slap in the Face (2016) by Abbas Khider. The selection of works is motivated by an interest in touching on different areas of law that have received little attention in interdisciplinary law and literature research to date, such as French anti-terror law, the customary law of the Albanian Kanun, Talmudic law, Corsican feudal vendetta law, and German asylum law.

In an era marked by global crises, political polarization, and contested truths, literature has re-emerged as a vital space for ethical reflection and legal imagination. This interdisciplinary volume explores how contemporary political authors engage with pressing societal issues—ranging from political power, democracy, dictatorship, colonization, sexual freedom, artificial intelligence to historical memory—while navigating the boundaries of artistic freedom and public responsibility.Bringing together scholars from law, literature, philosophy, and sociology, the book examines the triangular relationship between author, text, and reception. It investigates how fiction can function as a site of dissent, normativity, and legal discourse, and how authors negotiate their roles as public intellectuals in a media-saturated world.With case studies on writers such as Juli Zeh, Robert Menasse, Shida Bazyar, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houllebecq, Günther Grass, Dave Egger, Svetlana Alexievich, Boualem Sansal, Jean-Philippe Pleau, and others, this volume offers a timely and critical contribution to debates on freedom of expression, the ethics of authorship, and the political power of literature.

In an era marked by global crises, political polarization, and contested truths, literature has re-emerged as a vital space for ethical reflection and legal imagination. This interdisciplinary volume explores how contemporary political authors engage with pressing societal issues—ranging from political power, democracy, dictatorship, colonization, sexual freedom, artificial intelligence to historical memory—while navigating the boundaries of artistic freedom and public responsibility.Bringing together scholars from law, literature, philosophy, and sociology, the book examines the triangular relationship between author, text, and reception. It investigates how fiction can function as a site of dissent, normativity, and legal discourse, and how authors negotiate their roles as public intellectuals in a media-saturated world.With case studies on writers such as Juli Zeh, Robert Menasse, Shida Bazyar, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michel Houllebecq, Günther Grass, Dave Egger, Svetlana Alexievich, Boualem Sansal, Jean-Philippe Pleau, and others, this volume offers a timely and critical contribution to debates on freedom of expression, the ethics of authorship, and the political power of literature.

As the climate crisis intensifies, contemporary literature has emerged as one of the most potent arenas for legal imagination. Legal Drafts in Anthropocene Literature examines how fiction set in the Anthropocene — ranging from cli-fi novels to experimental poetry — anticipates, critiques and actively shapes the development of legal frameworks aimed at addressing environmental destruction.Building on the key idea that literature acts as a ‘seismographic’ indicator of legal change, this volume brings together Alexandra Juster, Justine Scarlaken, Matthew Birkhold, and Amitabh Vikram Dwivedi, who analyse works by John Ironmonger, Gaspard Koenig, Jean Giono, Camille de Toledo, Baptiste Morizot, Jessie Kleemann, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Indra Sinha. The authors reveal how fictional narratives generate what the volume terms 'legal drafts' — implicit or explicit proposals for new legal concepts, instruments, and responsibilities that are urgently needed in the Anthropocene era.The volume addresses the most pressing legal questions of our time: How can individuals and collectives be held accountable for climate damage? Should nature be granted legal personality? What would an ‘ecocide’ prosecution entail, and how can narratives render such an unthinkable crime imaginable? How does poetry expose the epistemological limits of law when confronted with slow violence and planetary interdependence?The contributions collectively demonstrate that literature does not merely reflect legal reality — it actively generates it, from river parliaments and beaver diplomacy in contemporary French literature to Greenlandic poetic testimony as a speculative lawsuit against ice melt and the narrative jurisprudence of climate governance fiction.