Richard Mullender, Matteo Nicolini, Thomas D.C. Bennett and Emilia Mickiewicz (eds): Law and Imagination in Troubled Tim
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Richard Mullender, Matteo Nicolini, Thomas D.C. Bennett and Emilia Mickiewicz (eds): Law and Imagination in Troubled Times. A Legal and Literary Discourse Routledge, London-New York, 2020, viii + 282 pp, £96 hardback, ISBN: 978-0367344115 Pasquale Viola1
© Springer Nature B.V. 2020
How can imagination and context be merged within the realm of the legal debate? In the lack of methodological certainties of under-explored subjects, the book Law and Imagination in Troubled Times. A legal and Literary Discourse combines the pathways that link the pure intellectual activity to the contemporary context and the way back, finding the ratio between “a cultural competence, a faculty of mind, a capacity for comprehension, synthesis, and creativity” (p. 1) and the real—and troubled—world. Basically, the book is most welcomed in its own main aim: “to satisfy the urgent need for composed creativity” (p. 3), in its programmatic, as well as cautionary, meanings. The book is organized as both an intellectual and pragmatic Möbius strip, i.e. a one-side non-orientable surface: it is possible to ‘walk’ on its entire surface without crossing a border or an edge. The parts of the book comprise four main subjects sliding on the surface and revolving around the quest for an imaginative legal/ literary development through an interdisciplinary approach. Numerous other works in literature and movies have recalled the most famous mathematical/geometrical examples and topological object of study, such as M. Prust’s In search of lost time (1913) and, in a certain way, F. Kafka’s The metamorphosis (1915) and J. Joyce’s Ulisses (1922), or the recent movie Donnie Darko (2001) directed by R. Kelly and the sci-fi series Dark (2017–2020). In the arts, M.C. Escher and M. Bill––among others––were inspired by this figure. According to the topological and Möbius strip-like properties of the book, the parts may be stretched, twisted, crumpled and bended, eternally characterizing the unitary argumentative––as well as pluralistic, varied and mixed––path traced by the first and the fourth parts, namely ‘Imagination, law, and history: framing the future’ * Pasquale Viola [email protected] 1
Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
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and ‘The future of the legal imagination.’ These serve and “touch” each other in a determined point of the strip without crossing the edge of the hypothetical figure, dealing with the historical development of legal scholarship and the role played by intertwined disciplines in framing the future. In this process of descriptive justification and theoretical determination, the second and third parts, namely ‘The courts and the legal imagination’ and ‘Thought, stylistics, and discourse’, focus on the functioning of the courts and the patterns of thought in legal scholarships, combining a wide range of themes. Chapter two ‘The progress of legal education in England’ points out the leading role of re-imagination in English legal education, emphasising different developments of Universities and L
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