Matteo Nicolini – författare

This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the ‘legal imagination.’Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate throughout the legal system. The collection probes ‘the transatlantic constitution’ and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability.The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future.The work provides stimulating reading for those working in the areas of legal philosophy, legal history and law and humanities and law and language.

This collection focuses on how troubled times impact upon the law, the body politic, and the complex interrelationship among them. It centres on how they engage in a dialogue with the imagination and literature, thus triggering an emergent (but thus far underdeveloped) field concerning the ‘legal imagination.’Legal change necessitates a close examination of the historical, cultural, social, and economic variables that promote and affect such change. This requires us to attend to the variety of non-legal variables that percolate throughout the legal system. The collection probes ‘the transatlantic constitution’ and focuses attention on imagination in a common law context that seems to foster imagination as a cultural capability.The book is divided into four parts. The first part begins with a set of insights into the historical development of legal education in England and concludes with a reflection on the historical transition of England from an absolute monarchy to a republic. The second part of the volume examines the role that imagination plays in the functioning of the courts. The third part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship and detects how legal imagination contributes to the process of producing new legal categories and terminology. The fourth part focuses on patterns of thought in legal scholarship, and looks to the impact of the imagination on legal thinking in the future.The work provides stimulating reading for those working in the areas of legal philosophy, legal history and law and humanities and law and language.

In recent times, comparative law has moved towards a new type of visualisation of the law, which is mainly based on indexes and indicators. Through these, legal scholars and practitioners measure legal systems against specific benchmarks; they no longer search for commonalities among legal systems but are interested in assessing how the law performs in economic terms. This book critically analyses this ‘quantitative turn’ in comparative law.The work focuses on the role played by social indicators in general, and legal indicators in particular, in contemporary societies. It presents the evaluation of indicators as a pattern of governance as well as a driver promoting a change in the law from ‘outside’. The authors explore a range of issues, including how and why the quantitative turn in comparative law has taken place; how legal indicators are created and for which purposes; whether indicators really act as a new form of legitimisation and law-making and, if so, if it is possible to resist or challenge their power; whether it is fair and equitable to measure the performance of diversified national legal frameworks through such managerial tools of governance; and ultimately, how legal indicators change the way we conceive of the law. The book addresses these issues by focusing on legal indicators, whose global ambitions are often related to societal concerns. To this extent, it examines how both non-economic and economic global indicators might have some bearing on the law.The volume will be of interest to advanced students, researchers, and academics in comparative law, global law, transnational law, constitutional law, and law and economics.

This collection celebrates the quadricentennial anniversary of Shakespeare's First Folio (1623), examining the intersection of law, literature, history, and performance through eight scholarly essays and an afterword. This volume explores how the First Folio serves as a crucial lens for understanding the politico-legal implications of Shakespeare's works, addressing themes of identity, authorship, orality, and print culture in early modern England.The collection provides an interdisciplinary analysis of legal concepts embedded in Shakespeare's plays, from constitutional questions in King John to legal theory in The Tempest. Contributors examine parliamentary representation, legal subjectivity, authorship and ownership rights, and comparative legal vulnerabilities across different cultural contexts. Each chapter demonstrates how Shakespeare's dramatic works engage with contemporary legal frameworks while remaining relevant to modern jurisprudential debates.This volume benefits advanced students, researchers, and scholars in law and literature, Shakespeare studies, legal history, and comparative literature. It appeals to academics working at the intersection of humanities and legal studies, offering fresh perspectives on canonical texts through rigorous interdisciplinary methodology. This book was originally published as a special issue of Law & Humanities.

This book invites readers to critically rethink the interrelations between geography and the law. Traditionally, legal-geographical interrelations have been dominated by scholars with backgrounds in geopolitics, economics, or geography. More recently, a new interdisciplinary approach has been developed with the aim of offering a fresh perspective on how law and geography intersect. There has been a steady growth in cross-disciplinary research in this field; how legal-geographical taxonomies interrelate has attracted attention from scholars and academics with a diverse range of backgrounds – namely, law, anthropology, and human/physical geography –, thus giving rise to several publications.Against this backdrop, the book adopts a legal comparative perspective and assesses ‘normative spatialities’, which are the outcomes of processes of legal-spatial production. In addition, the comparative analysis offers readers new insights on some traditional geographicfeatures which are essential to legal studies (territorial identity, regional demarcation, territorial alternation, and place-name policy). Examples are drawn from several jurisdictions (both from the Global North and the Global South) and partly employ a diachronic perspective.As its subversive character is ideally suited to revealing policies and agendas, comparative law is used to identify the ethnocentric and colonial biases underpinning the use (and misuse) of legal geographic devices by policymakers and academics. In sum, the book presents legal geography as an interdisciplinary undertaking in which geographers and legal scholars can jointly examine common concepts in the historical, cultural, political and social contexts in which law is practised. The book transcends the boundaries between disciplines to engage in a fruitful dialogue on how the law can help to address the current socio-geographic and ecological crises.

This book invites readers to critically rethink the interrelations between geography and the law. Traditionally, legal-geographical interrelations have been dominated by scholars with backgrounds in geopolitics, economics, or geography. More recently, a new interdisciplinary approach has been developed with the aim of offering a fresh perspective on how law and geography intersect. There has been a steady growth in cross-disciplinary research in this field; how legal-geographical taxonomies interrelate has attracted attention from scholars and academics with a diverse range of backgrounds – namely, law, anthropology, and human/physical geography –, thus giving rise to several publications.Against this backdrop, the book adopts a legal comparative perspective and assesses ‘normative spatialities’, which are the outcomes of processes of legal-spatial production. In addition, the comparative analysis offers readers new insights on some traditional geographicfeatures which are essential to legal studies (territorial identity, regional demarcation, territorial alternation, and place-name policy). Examples are drawn from several jurisdictions (both from the Global North and the Global South) and partly employ a diachronic perspective.As its subversive character is ideally suited to revealing policies and agendas, comparative law is used to identify the ethnocentric and colonial biases underpinning the use (and misuse) of legal geographic devices by policymakers and academics. In sum, the book presents legal geography as an interdisciplinary undertaking in which geographers and legal scholars can jointly examine common concepts in the historical, cultural, political and social contexts in which law is practised. The book transcends the boundaries between disciplines to engage in a fruitful dialogue on how the law can help to address the current socio-geographic and ecological crises.

The book provides a comprehensive analysis of local government in federations. It fills the gap in current legal research and positions local government in federal studies through the lenses of comparative law, adopting a more nuanced approach to local government. The book considers the shortcomings between the black-letter constitution and its operational rules. Whether (and how) the regime of local government is implemented is more relevant than its formal-but-ineffective recognition. The comparative survey discloses the variety local institutions take in different federal contexts. Divided into three parts, the book comprises chapters investigating local government in systems that, to various degrees, have been examined and classified as federal. Scholars throughout the world have examined the federal-local connection in aggregative federations, (the USA, Canada, Switzerland, Germany, Australia, and Austria), devolutionary ones (Belgium, Bosnia Herzegovina, Italy, Spain, the UK, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and the Russian Federation), as well as in federations beyond the West, where federalism-as-a-colonial-legacy has undergone a process of reinvention affecting the federal-local connection (South Africa, Ethiopia, India, Nigeria, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Nepal, Palau, Federated States of Micronesia; St. Kitts and Nevis; United Arab Emirates; and Pakistan).

The book provides a comprehensive analysis of local government in federations.

This collection explores the heterogeneous places we have traditionally been taught to term ‘islands.’ It stages a conversation on the very idea of ‘island-ness’, thus contributing to a new field of research at the crossroads of law, geography, literature, urban planning, politics, arts, and cultural studies. The contributions to this volume discuss the notion of island-ness as a device triggering the imagination, triggering narratives and representations in different creative fields; they explore the interactions between legal, socio-political, and fictional approaches to remoteness and the ‘state of insularity,’ policy responses to both remoteness and boundaries on different scales, and the insular legal framing of geographical remoteness. The product of a cross-disciplinary exchange on islands, this edited volume will be of great interest to those working in the fields of Island Studies, as well as literary studies scholars, geographers, and legal scholars.