Law, Culture and the Humanities Journal

Law, Culture and the Humanities is a publication of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities. It is co-sponsored by the Socio-Legal Research Centre at Griffith University (Australia) and Amherst College (USA) and is published three times a year.

This interdisciplinary journal publishes high quality work at the intersection of scholarship on law, culture and the humanities. It provides an outlet for people engaged in interdisciplinary, humanistically oriented legal scholarship. The mission of Law, Culture and the Humanities is to encourage dialogue across and among these fields about issues of interpretation, identity and values, authority, obligation, justice and law’s place in culture.

Crossing traditional divides to reflect the diverse nature of this exciting area, the scope of Law, Culture and the Humanities includes:

Legal history
Legal theory and jurisprudence
Law and cultural studies
Law and literature
Legal hermeneutics

From our Latest Issue

On Legal and Legitimate Wars in the Transforming Public Sphere: Social Contract Theory’s Confusion about War Declarations
April 18, 2023 by Chris Barker
Law, Culture and the Humanities, Ahead of Print. This paper examines the discursive conditions that make war legal and legitimate. In the Post-World War II period, when countries do not declare war, the gap between legality and legitimacy has widened, and wars are often neither. While other studies of war-declaring typically focus on the relations […]
On Captain Vere and the Electric Chair: Capital Punishment, Billy Budd, and Fantasies of Sovereign Power in the Late 19th Century
March 10, 2023 by Daniel LaChance
Law, Culture and the Humanities, Ahead of Print. While Herman Melville was writing Billy Bud, Sailor, political elites in his home state of New York were overhauling their state’s death penalty. Their work culminated in the Electrical Execution Act of 1888. In addition to changing the state’s execution method from hanging to electrocution, the legislation […]
Omniscient Narrative Modes in Law: From Trial Strategy to the Fellow-Servant Rule
March 10, 2023 by Simon Stern
Law, Culture and the Humanities, Ahead of Print. Research in law and literature often uses the term “narrative” as a shorthand for various kinds of motivated legal reasoning, indicating that facts, doctrines, and the relations among them have been chosen and arranged for a particular purpose. Alternatively, speaking of “narrative” may be a way of […]

Submission Details

Have an article you think would be good for the journal? We encourage submissions at the intersection of scholarship on law, culture and the humanities.

Submission Info

Editorial Board

EDITOR

Austin Sarat, Departments of Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought and Political Science, Amherst, College, USA

BOOK REVIEW EDITOR

Jennifer Culbert, Political Science, Johns Hopkins University

ASSOCIATE EDITORS

Susan Sage Heinzelman, English, University of Texas, USA
James Martel, Political Science, San Francisco State University, USA
Keally McBride, University of San Francisco
Linda Meyer, Quinnipiac Law School, USA
William MacNeil, Griffith Law School, Griffith University, Australia
Karl Shoemaker, Department of History and School of Law, University of Wisconsin, USA

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