Beyond Reasonable Doubt: Conversations in Law, Literature and Philosophy from the Reformation to the Present Day

Description

Conveners
Yota Batsaki
Subha Mukherji
Jan-Melissa Schramm

Plenary Speakers

    * John Bender
    * Peter Brooks
    * Leo Damrosch
    * Kathy Eden
    * Lorna Hutson
    * Luke Wilson
    * Barbara Shapiro

This conference aims to bring scholars of literature, law and philosophy into interdisciplinary conversation. In the course of the last three decades, legal practitioners, literary critics, jurists and philosophers have found in this dialogue an enriched vocabulary for the exploration of their own particular interests. Ambitious and visionary research has been undertaken which has advanced our understanding of topics as disparate as the history of the novel, censorship, blasphemy, plagiarism, hermeneutic theory, and the rhetorical manipulation of narrative within the courtroom.

We have invited papers on any aspect of the intersection of these discourses, including papers that might address some of the following topics:

    * evidence, interpretation, judgement
    * the role of doubt and scepticism in critical enquiry
    * casuistry, rhetoric, persuasion, ethics
    * legal and poetic fiction
    * equity
    * the role of narrative jurisprudence
    * testimony, confession, autobiography
    * contract, agency and intentionality
    * methodological issues: the value of interdisciplinarity
    * censorship, blasphemy, plagiarism and intellectual property
    * gender, sexuality, law and ethics
    * human, divine and natural law; the law of genre
    * epistemologies

Recent events in European political and public life have given these sub-themes an enhanced profile which demands further interdisciplinary investigation. 'Beyond Reasonable Doubt' seeks to bring into dialogue representatives and practitioners across the three disciplines.