Jurisprudential Shakespeare: Critiquing anti-hermeneutic legal thought with 'Romeo and Juliet', 'Richard II', and 'Pericles'.

摘要

This project takes literature as a legal heuristic on a jurisprudential level. It analyzes Shakespearean manifestations of inheritance, authority, and transmission to unpack how their fictionalization can sponsor jurisprudential critique. Chapter One reads inheritance and interpretation in Romeo and Juliet, which dramatizes the insufficiencies of legal theories like natural law theory that disavow interpretation. Chapter Two explores authority in law through the legal concept of "originalism." It argues that Richard II demonstrates the difficulties of mundanely manifested transcendent ideas, such as monarchy or constitutional meaning. Chapter Three argues for the value for law of avowed interpretability, using Pericles to assess efforts to impose purity on inherently impure processes through judicial unpublication. Pericles demonstrates the impossibility of this transmissional mode while also refuting its worth. Each chapter critiques what the project calls anti-hermeneutic theories of law, legal theories that deny interpretability in order to establish their authority.