What is it about?
Study of the relation between law and literature tends to focus on the relationship between the law, or legal cases, and narrative. Law does rely on narratives, its "case histories", but what then do we make of the relationship between law and poetry, especially lyric poetry which is often not narrative in form? This paper argues that poetry bears an intrinsic relation to the thinking of justice rather than law. Justice transcends law and often defies the letter of the law; poetry suspends definitive meaning and allows for differences to coexist--which is one way to define what a just world might look like.
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Why is it important?
In a time of manifest injustices, we need a concept of justice and a revaluation of poetry's possibilities in order to imagine utopian alternatives to a world gone awry.
Perspectives
This essay honors the thinking and example of a brilliant legal theorist and historian, Nasser Hussain, who passed away from us all too early. His passionate antagonism to injustice, from Guantanamo to drone warfare, from colonialism to military occupation, together with his love of poetry, inspired this essay and its concern with the imagination of justice.
David Lloyd
University of California, Riverside
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Nomos and Lyric: On Poetry and Justice, Law Culture and the Humanities, November 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1743872117740647.
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