The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities

How does materiality matter to legal scholarship? What can affect studies offer to legal scholars? What are the connections among visual studies, art history, and the knowledge and experience of law? What can the disciplines of book history, digital humanities, performance studies, disability studies, and post-colonial studies contribute to contemporary and historical understandings of law? These are only some of the important questions addressed in this wide-ranging collection of law and humanities scholarship.

Collecting 45 new essays by leading international scholars, The Oxford Handbook of Law and Humanities showcases the work of law and humanities across disciplines, addressing methods, concepts and themes, genres, and areas of the law. The essays explore under-researched domains such as comics, videos, police files, form contracts, and paratexts, and shed new light on traditional topics, such as free speech, intellectual property, international law, indigenous peoples, immigration, evidence, and human rights. The Handbook provides an exciting new agenda for scholarship in law and humanities, and will be essential reading for anyone interested in the intersections of law and humanistic inquiry.

Simon Stern teaches law and English at the University of Toronto. His research focuses on the evolution of legal doctrines and methods in relation to literary and intellectual history. Recent and forthcoming publications include articles and book chapters on legal fictions, obscenity, copyright, criminal fraud, the place of narrative in law, and methodology in legal scholarship.

Maksymilian Del Mar is Reader in Legal Theory and Founding Director of the Centre for Law and Society in a Global Context at the School of Law, Queen Mary University of London. His primary research interests lie in the theory and history of legal reasoning and legal education (especially rhetoric, imagination, and emotion), in the methodology of jurisprudence (especially historical and visual jurisprudence), and in transnational and global legal theory. He edits the Law in Context series for Cambridge University Press.

Bernadette Meyler is Carl and Sheila Spaeth Professor of Law and Professor (by Courtesy) of English at Stanford University. She works on constitutional law and theory, as well as law and the humanities. Her book Theaters of Pardoning (Cornell University Press, 2019) draws on dramatic, political, and legal sources to assess the evolution of the pardon power and its relationship with sovereignty in seventeenth-century England. She is also the co-editor of New Directions in Law and Literature (Oxford University Press, 2017) and many articles in law reviews and peer-reviewed journals.