Thomas D.C. Bennett – 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 2004, a judgment from the highest court in the UK gave birth to a new era of privacy law. That case, brought by the supermodel Naomi Campbell against Mirror Group Newspapers, is today rightly regarded as a turning point for the protection of individuals’ privacy. The case is seen as the turning point in the development of English privacy law, and has also had major implications for the law elsewhere, including in Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, and Canada. The manner in which the common law’s privacy protections have developed since, and the direction in which they might develop still further, are the subject of this book. This collection, written by leading scholars in the privacy field from the UK and beyond, considers the legacy of Campbell’s case. The contributors address the Campbell legacy from a range of legal perspectives and discuss broader themes of power, metaphor, consistency, and technological change. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Media Law.