English Legal Discourse Research Articles

“Wonne with Custome”: Conquest and Etymology in the Spenser-Harvey Letters and A View of the Present State of Ireland

This essay argues for a connection between two texts that are usually considered unrelated, Edmund Spenser’s A View of the Present State of Ireland and his correspondence with Gabriel Harvey that preceded it by nearly twenty years. Both texts negotiate the problem of implementing foreign rule, whether poetic or political, by appealing to a major intellectual and political reference point of the period: the concept of custom. In the Letters both Spenser and Harvey treat custom as the mechanism that makes the foreign familiar, drawing upon a widespread classical and early modern understanding of custom. At the same time, however, they appeal to and subvert the sixteenth-century English legal discourse of custom as it was developed in the realm of common law, wherein custom is figured as a form of resistance to foreign imposition, especially in the context of the Norman Conquest. This self-conscious probing of the complex and at times contradictory logic of legal custom provides a heuristic framework for Spenser’s approach to custom’s thorny role in the conquest of Ireland in A View. As a result of his exchange with Harvey, Spenser foregrounds the difficulty, even futility, of deploying language, with its vexed and layered etymologies, in the service of a political project.

Types of Metaphors in The English Legal Discourse

Abstract The main purpose of my paper is that of analyzing English legal discourse and legal texts belonging to different genres within the same subject field, in this case legal English, from the point of view of the variety of metaphors it consists of. Metaphor represents one among many other elements of legal discourse.

Sacred and Secular Blasphemies

Mass migration and other features of globalisation make easy distinctions between East and West difficult to maintain. Homi Bhabha views Western societies as incorporating increasing elements of hybridity in which the crossing of cultural frontiers and the creation of hybrid identities challenge the crude opposition between East and West. This analysis has its attractions, but becomes flawed when applied to law. When British Muslims sought to use the English law of blasphemy against the publication of The Satanic Verses, English legal discourse found recourse to representations of Islamic law that essentialised it. The English courts’ reaction to the claims of Muslims, compounded by decisions of the European Court of Human Rights, exposes the polarisation of those antagonistic binarisms that Bhabha was so quick to jettison in his celebration of hybridity and also the sharpening of moral oppositions between Islam and the West. This interpretation reveals the limits of cultural hybridity and how essentialising discourses which emphasise cultural boundedness are produced in the name of a subversive aesthetic hybridity. In utilising Bhabha’s notion of hybridity, this article focuses on the lack of hybridity in the interaction between English and Islamic law in the case of blasphemy and the limited extent of any legal pluralism. In addition, the analysis shows how English postcolonial legal discourse owes much to its colonial past in representing Islamic law as ‘Other’ and, in so doing, monopolises legal culture for itself.

Rigidity and fuzziness within the framework of English Statutes and Law Reports. Original French title: Rigidité et Fluidité dans les cadres Législatif et jurisprudentiel anglais

Rigidity and fuzziness within the framework of English Statutes and Law Reports. Original French title: Rigidité et Fluidité dans les cadres Législatif et jurisprudentiel anglais