Configuring Justice

Resumo

While scholarship on a variety of literary-linguistic connections of law and the humanities has these past few decades greatly augmented the scope of legal theory, I would argue in this paper that we need to consider the bond of theory and practice in law and jurisprudence when we turn to the humanities for our interdisciplinary ventures, on the view that the original idea(l) of literary-legal studies was to help provide nourishment to the legal practitioner. This is especially acute because, to me at least, it is through law in practice that we can learn to speak of justice. So the quid-juris question that is at the heart of legal doctrine and jurisprudence traditionally conceived, remains important when it comes to investigating the possibilities of the humanities’ contribution on the methodological plane. In other words, while we may discuss issues of justice in the abstract, it is only in the way in which actual legal issues are resolved that we can at all decide that justice is being done. We cannot, therefore, think about justice without law in practice, because legal meaning and justice are the products of discussions on how to establish concrete legal and social relations. This speaks for attention to how law is and can be done. I aim to turn to continental-European philosophical hermeneutics, especially as developed by Paul Ricoeur, rich as his work is on the subjects of metaphor, practical wisdom and the equitable, in order to develop my main argument and offer suggestions for Law and Literature in practice through the lens of the studia humanitatis.

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