Equity, Law & Literature

The present volume stems from our previous research on The Concept of Equity: A Diachronical Assessment (2007). The essays in this new collection demonstrate how lively and active the debate on equity has been and how difficult it is to find a concluding word on this topic. In literature a new idea concerning equity is slowly being shaped. The discourse offered by literature is of an alternative kind; we are reminded of the utopian function of equity in Plato’s Republic, where it aims at transcending reality and the mimetic description of it. There is something mysterious about equity: we cannot grasp it easily in terms of rational argumentation. It is all about norm and its inversion; at the same time it is deconstructive. Thus sometimes equity appears to be beyond the sphere of reality and takes us into a mysterious and incomprehensible world.

 

TABLE OF CONTENTS
 
 
DANIELA CARPI

Introduction  7
 
JEANNE GAAKEER

Law in Context, Law, Equity, and the Realm of Human Affairs  33
 
ERIC RABKIN

Fantasies of Equity  71
 
CRISTINA COSTANTINI

The Judicature Acts and the con-fusion of Law and Equity  91
 
GARY WATT

The Sword of Equity  99
 
LEIF DAHLBERG
Achilles’ Foot and the Law: Legal Space(s), Striated and Smooth  119
 
IAN WARD

The Feint of Equity: The Huntingdon Case  141
 
CHIARA BATTISTI

Equity and Otherness: The Shadow of Terrorism  167
 
MARIA MIGLIAZZA

Equity and Human Rights under International Law  177
 
HEINZ ANTOR

Diversity, Cosmopolitanism and Ethics in the Age of Inter- and Transculturalism  191
 
PAUL RAFFIELD

Shakespeare’s Imaginary Constitution: Justice, Fairness and the Dramatic Representation of Law  207
 
PAOLA BASEOTTO

Equity in Action: The Trial and Execution of Mary Queen of Scots in Spenser’s Faerie Queene  223
 
GIUSEPPINA RESTIVO

Equity v. Revenge in Shakespeare: re-considering The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, Hamlet  231
 
REGINA M. SCHWARTZ

Justice and Law in The Merchant of Venice  247
 
RICHARD CAVE

Endings in Renaissance Comedy: Ben Jonson and Richard Brome  263

 

KLAUS STIERSTORFER

Adam Smith: Literature as Equity?  285
 
PATRIZIA NEROZZI BELLMAN

Equity on Trial: Judicial Cases in the Novels of Richardson and Fielding  295
 
YVONNE BEZRUCKA

A Tale of Two Cities: Charles Dickens’s Political Examination of Law, Legalized Violence, Authority, and Retributive Justice  317
 
RÜDIGER AHRENS
Equity as Ethical Principle in the Scottish Enlightenment and in Postcolonial Literatures  335
 
MARA LOGALDO

Crime Sublime: Literary Mercy and the Law in Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood  355
 
DANIELA CARPI

Tim Parks’s Judge Savage: a Quest for Atonement  367
 
SIDIA FIORATO

Justice and Lawyers at Court: Reflections on P.D. James’ A Certain Justice  381
 
CRISTINA GATTI

The [In]equitable Quest for Language Diversity  403
 
MARINA BONDI AND DAVIDE MAZZI

The Words of Equity: an Analysis of a Corpus of Judgments  425
 
PAOLA VETTOREL

Equality Through Language? A Matter of Inclusiveness  447