International Studies in Law and Literature – serie

Close readings of acclaimed 20th century novels and lesser known but stunning works of popular culture uniquely situate us to understand the clash of religious values that led to genocide in World War II Europe (including Great Britain). The author further engages pre-Shoah writers, such as Shakespeare and Melville, signposts to seismic conflicts in law and religion. Law and Literature methods permit the author to uncover the falsehood and antisemitic violence emerging from longstanding religious differences. Inspired by James Carroll (Constantine’s Sword), Harold Bloom (Jesus and Yahweh), and Franklin Littell (The Crucifixion of the Jews), Weisberg provokes readers, through reengagement with a series of superb stories, to see in all of them millennia of atrocities disguised as “Judeo-Christian” affinity. As in his Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (NYU; Gordon & Breach), the author again utilizes archival materials from the wartime period, integrating them into his close readings of fiction."Richard Weisberg's standing as a sage of the Law and Literature Movement is augmented in this masterful book."Anthony Julius, Deputy Chairman Mishcon de Reya LLP, Professor, Faculty of Laws, University College London. "In this masterful book, Richard Weisberg brings his extraordinary learning to bear on a group of stories, written both before and after the Holocaust, to explore some of its deepest, and most hidden causes. The Holocaust, Weisberg argues, was fueled by Christianity-infused interpretations of religious and legal texts, which have been deployed for centuries against Jewish traditions, intellectual histories, customs, Jewish Law, and legalist ideals. Weisberg builds his case through literary and legal analyses of (among others) Malamud’s The Fixer, Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice, Melville’s Billy Budd Sailor, Gunter Grass’s The Tin Drum, The Old Testament, Nietzsche’s meditations on morals, and holocaust-era legal texts from Germany, Britain and Vichy France. We are ill-served by attempts to paper over and distort this history with bromides about “Judeo-Christian” values and shared aspirations. Weisberg’s elegant and straightforward scholarship takes us on a path toward a truer accounting."Professor Robin West, Georgetown Law."Richard Weisberg has written an incisive critique of the idea that there is a coherent “Judeo-Christian” tradition. Instead, he emphasizes both the chasms that separate the two religions and goes on to suggest that classical Christian mischaracterization of Judaism contributed to the zeitgeist that made the Holocaust possible. One need not agree with every aspect of his argument to find it illuminating and very much worth extensive discussion. That is especially the case with regard to his truly brilliant analyses of The Merchant of Venice, which is compelling and transformative with regard to the oft-debated assertion, which Weisberg denies, that the play is “anti-Semitic.” Sanford Levinson, University of Texas Law School, author of Written in Stone: Public Monuments and Changing Societies.

What kind of relationship exists between law and literature? Why have so many great jurists and philosophers used literature to explore their own disciplines? What were they looking for, and what did they find? What can law learn from literature, and how does literature reflect legal praxis? This book takes us on a fascinating journey through those questions and their answers. The first part offers a diachronic and thematic overview of the law and literature movement, showing how literature has influenced new ways of thinking about law from a narrative, hermeneutic, humanistic, ethical, and critical perspective. The second part analyzes the value of literature in the education of students, lawyers, and judges. And the third section presents a captivating analysis of the literary notion of justice and the relationship between literature and the economic analysis of law.

Telling stories as a way of exploring the law—this is the premise of the present volume. It draws on a wide range of narrative forms: historical fables and animal allegories, science fiction and realist reportage, dreamlike speculations and fantastical tales, philosophical reflections and dystopian visions.Across nine stories, the book invites readers to reflect on law and justice by posing strange and unsettling questions:Should there be laws aboard Noah’s Ark? Between absolute love and unleashed violence, what place is there for Pilate’s Roman justice in the trial of Jesus? What do the animal trials held in the West up to the French Revolution reveal? What if Robinson Crusoe, having set sail from Brazil in search of African slaves for his plantations, had not been shipwrecked on the outward journey—but on the way back? Where do the hidden passages of the majestic Palace of Justice lead? And what kind of justice lies buried in its secret depths? What is law for? The story of the Amoco Cadiz shipwreck offers a stark and contrasting answer. Can reality sometimes surpass fiction? The distortion of law in a modern democracy suggests it can. A dystopia emerges when, enthralled by their president Selfidor and his motto “Never two without me,” the people begin to forget the law. Killing your own clone—one equipped with artificial intelligence, no less—is it murder, or the destruction of a non-human entity? Over the years, the author loses touch with his beloved library. Books disappear, others turn up in the strangest places. What is The Liberated Library trying to tell him? And what kind of legal knowledge does it contain? This book was originally published by Éditions DALLOZ under the title, Contes de la rue Soufflot (2024).

The thinking that feels is tension – an openness without object, an act of listening and an awaiting of sense. It is a mode of thought that arises from a living encounter with the other, with something or someone who is at once a limit and a threshold.The original search for sense that unfolds in the liminal space of alterity may be the most authentically juridical one, yet it risks being lost in the drift of law reduced to a dehumanized mechanics. By turning to Aesthetics and to the methodology of Law and Humanities, we can learn to perceive and inhabit the limit – making of it an art, so as to once again listen to and speak the law.