Great Trials and the Law in the Historical Imagination

This book introduces readers to issues in legal, historical, and cultural interpretation by examining six well-known historical trials through works of art that portray them.

Great Trials and the Law in the Historical Imagination: A Law and Humanities Approach introduces readers to the history of law and issues in historical, legal, and artistic interpretation by examining six well-known historical trials through works of art that portray them. *Great Trials* provides readers with an accessible, non-dogmatic introduction to the interdisciplinary 'law and humanities' approach to law, legal history, and legal interpretation. By examining how six famous/notorious trials in Western history have been portrayed in six major works of art, the book shows how issues of legal, historical, and artistic interpretation can become intertwined: the different ways we embed law in narrative, how we bring conscious and subconscious conceptions of history to our interpretation of law, and how aesthetic predilections and moral commitments to the law may influence our views of history. The book studies well-known depictions of the trials of Socrates, Cicero, Jesus, Thomas More, the Salem 'witches', and John Scopes and provides innovative analyses of those works. The epilogue examines how historical methodology and historical imagination are crucial to both our understanding of the law and our aesthetic choices through various readings of Harper Lee's beloved character, Atticus Finch.

The first book to employ a 'law and humanities' approach to delve into the institution of the trial, and what it means in different legal systems at different historical times, this book will appeal to academics, students and others with interests in legal history, law and popular culture and law and the humanities.

Autorentext

Russell L. Dees is Lecturer in Law at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

Inhalt

Part I: Ancients, 1. The Trial of Socrates: Democracy and Truth in the Apology, 2. Cicero and the Trial of Gaius Verres: 'Civic Corruption', the Rule of Law, and the Analogy of Republican Rome, 3. The Trial of Jesus: Law, Narrative, and Nomos in the Gospel according to Mark, Part II: Moderns, 4. The Trial of Thomas More: Authentic Selfhood and Procedural Law in A Man for All Seasons, 5. The Salem Witch Trials: The Tragedy of Law in The Crucible, 6. The Great Monkey Trial: Historical 'Memory' and the 'Politics of Eternity', Epilogue, The Vicissitudes of a Fictional Character: Time, Atticus Finch, and Constitutional Evil