Australian Feminist Law Journal – Special Issue (2012) Volume 36
Special Issue Editor: Marett Leiboff

The first tentative steps inaugurating the Law Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia took place at the final (as it later turned out) Law and Literature conference, Trans(l)egalite, held at Griffith Law School in 2009. This was a fin de siècle moment in more ways than one, in which the new association grew out of its predecessor, echoing the zeitgeist, in particular the Law, Culture and Humanities Association and its Journal (co-founded by Professor William MacNeil, Australia’s leading scholar in the field) and institutions devoted to Law and Humanities scholarship (Melbourne, Birkbeck).

It is not surprising that Law and Humanities appears as if it had been born fully-formed, Athena-like from the head of Zeus. Literature is archetypally a constituent facet of a ‘humanities’ or ‘arts’ of the first part of the 20th century, balsam like soothing law’s rigours. But literature is not ‘the humanities’ in its broadest sweep. The collection of essays that make up ‘Law and Humanities Futures’ traces the tensions inherent in law’s dislocation from the humanities both as an ersatz artefact and as a deep exploration of the humanities as a marker of human ethic and existence – humanities as humanity singular and its antonym, the inhuman and inhumane. It engages with the literary and with law and literature, with history, with cultural studies, with representation, and with law and literature and law and humanities encounters outside the common law world – the Netherlands, Germany and the intergalactic, into the realm of film, fiction and beyond. In looking to a Law and Humanities Futures, the issue looks both back into time and forward into the future.

Contents:

  • ‘Ghosts of Law and Humanities (Past, Present, Future)’ – Marett Leiboff
  • ‘Reverent Rites of Legal Theory: Unity – Diversity – Interdisciplinarity’ – Jeanne Gaakeer
  • ‘Signature and Illusion: Lessons from the Baroque for ‘Truth’ in Law, Arts and Humanities’ – Richard Mohr
  • ‘Law is not Turgid and Literature not Soft and Fleshy: Gendering and Heteronormativity in Law and Literature Scholarship’ – Greta Olson
  • ‘Unintended Consequences: Representations of Rwandan Women and their Children Born from Rape’ – Karen Crawley and Olivera Simic
  • ‘Towards a Feminist Aesthetic of Justice: Sarah Kane’s Blasted as Theorisation of the Representation of Sexual Violence in International Law’ – Honni van Rijswijk
  • ‘‘The Force’ as Law: Mythology, Ideology and Order in George Lucas’s Star Wars’ – Timothy D Peters
  • ‘‘Ditto’: Law, Pop Culture and Humanities and the Impact of Intergenerational Interpretative Dissonance’ – Marett Leiboff

The Australian Feminist Law Journal is published by the Socio-Legal Research Centre, Griffith University and is available in all major University libraries and online with Informit, Heinonline, Proquest and EBSCO.

For more information about the Journal or to subscribe please visit the Australian Feminist Law Journal website.