The Project

The project aims at an interdisciplinary exploration of the concept of equity in English Law and Literature, starting from the sixteenth century up to today. Its first goal is to produce an understanding of the different meanings and outcomes of equity in Anglo-Saxon culture, to evaluate its advantages and drawbacks, analyse its typologies and incidence, different in time and space, and to question its possible forms and usefulness.

The four teams set out to highlight the notion of equity from an international perspective, that is by studying the application of equitable principles in the context of international law. As it is widely known, equitable principles emerged as an adjunct to both Roman law and the English common law with the aim to ameliorate or correct the body of civil law. Two prominent legal theorists of the seventeenth century who greatly influenced the emerging law of nations, Grotius and von Pufendorf, assigned an important role to equity in the framework of relations between nations. Grotius, in particular, referred to the Aristotelian idea of equity as twofold – as an understanding of what was right and as a corrective element to moderate the general law.
The first step of the research aims at analysing the presence of equity within the conventional sources of international law, in particular in the statutes and rules of procedures of international jurisdictional bodies. The notion of equity is not explicitly mentioned among the sources listed in article 38, first paragraph, of the Statute of the International Court of Justice of the United Nations. Nonetheless, equity could be included in the “general principles of law recognised by civilized nations”, as this source of law refers to principles which are shared by international law and various national systems of law. In this light, the research implies an assessment of the relevance of equity in the context of the aforementioned principles.
In the history of English culture the relation between religious and philosophical thought and political and juristic conception is at the core of the literary text in various shapes and ways according to age and genre differences, acting as a means of framing the modern ethical consciousness. The term “modernity” here refers to a variety of cultural phenomena which contribute to the creation of a shared awareness at crucial moments of the historical process.

As a second step the teams will contextualize their research spanning from the Elizabethan period to the contemporary one. The Elizabethan age in fact marked a turning point in the history of English law and offered a crucial contribution to the development of the modern concept of justice (suffice it to give as an example the laying of the fundamental principles of the international law of war by Alberico Gentili, an Italian jurist holder of the chair of Civil Law at Oxford). The problematic relation between strictum ius (justice absolute) and equity was at the core of the Elizabethan debate on justice. The Elizabethan debate on the moral, theological, political and social implications of the administration of justice is amply documented in a large number of treatises.
In the Eighteenth century the relation between authority and the individual is the focus of the reflection in literary and non literary texts, from philosophical treatises to periodicals to novels. In the realistic novel the relation between characters and society is at the core of a narrative discourse which dramatizes in the form of the protagonists’ exemplary behaviour the principles behind institutional authority. These principles are strongly influenced by Locke’s conception of the individual as subject of rights, a juridical person as well as a physical person and by Hume’s views of the foundation of justice in “the well-being of mankind and the existence of society”.

In the twentieth century the debate gets intermingled with the concepts of human rights and merges with a new attention paid to literature as a fundamental source of legal examples.

The concept of equity has never been studied within English literature by such a comparative point of view. This research can be the more useful as it is an absolute novelty for Italy and as it develops at a time when a European Constitution is taking form and new connections are sought for among the different nations of Europe. If the legal culture is of evident interest in the study of equity, the literary text can be considered as a cultural touchstone for the incidence of equity in public opinion and cultural reception, a background for the history of law as well as a parallel performative language, whose success is measured by its ability to draw or spread a representation of the world and to hinder or produce consensus.
An intrinsic goal of the project lies in its very nature as an interdisciplinary study, in its aiming at a common awareness through different ways. This will guarantee its ‘poliphonic originality’, linking aspects of culture often kept separate, developing an awareness useful in facing and solving prejudices and misunderstandings, elaborating a ‘culture of convergence’.
Literature has paid enormous attention to legal issues, thus it has in turn become an object of interest for attorneys. Both branches attempt to understand the world and to lay the foundation for peaceful coexistence; they furthermore attempt to understand the human soul and set the boundaries between good and evil, justice and injustice. In psychoanalytical terms, literature has become the subconscious of the law, its dream and, as it represents the language of the subconscious, it helps the law understand the problems of institutions.

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