Law�s Metaphors

Law’s Metaphors: Interrogating Languages of Law, Justice and Legitimacy presents a series of essays that reveal how metaphors for terms relating to the theory and practice of law are utilized in legal texts, literary works, and in our popular imagination.

• Represents an innovative approach to interdisciplinary legal scholarship
• Features new developments in theorizing law’s relations with language, society, and culture
• Includes contributions from European and North American scholars across several relevant disciplines
• Reveals the prevalence and power of the use of metaphors in the legal profession and in the popular imagination

1. Law's Metaphors: Introduction (David Gurnham)

2. Metaphor as Analogy: Reproduction and Production of Legal Concepts (Angela Condello)

3. The Metaphor of Proportionality (Nicola Lacey)

4. Flesh of the Law: Material Legal Metaphors (Andreas Philippopoulos-Mihalopoulos)

5. The Trials of Lizzie Eustace: Trollope, Sensationalism, and the Condition of English Law (Ian Ward)

6. M. NourbeSe Philip's Zong!: Metaphors, Laws, and Fugues of Justice (Anne Que'ma)

7. 'We Want to Live': Metaphor and Ethical Life in F.W. Maitland's Jurisprudence of the Trust (Adam Gearey)

8. Debating Rape: To Whom does the Uncanny 'Myth' Metaphor Belong? (David Gurnham)

9. Is the Blush off the Rose? Legal Education Metaphors in a Changing World (Michelle LeBaron)

David Gurnham is Associate Professor in Law, University of Southampton, UK. His books include Crime, Desire and Law’s Unconscious: Law, Literature and Culture (2014), and Memory, Imagination, Justice: Intersections of Law and Literature (2009).

Metaphors are not just figurative expressions that beautify language. In countless topics they often serve as essential linguistic devices to facilitate a deeper conceptual understanding — including the field of law. In fact, metaphors for and in law have greatly contributed to the ways in which legal concepts, rules and principles are constructed, understood, and deployed. Law’s Metaphors: Interrogating Languages of Law, Justice and Legitimacy presents a series of illuminating essays that reveal how metaphors are utilized in and around legal discourse and texts, across a wide range of literature, and in the popular imagination. Featuring contributions from leading experts in various disciplines, the chapters in this collection show how the use of metaphors in legal language — giving figurative expression to law as having a “body”, with a “long arm” and blindfolded “eyes”, having “grounds”, “boundaries” and “sources” – has considerable implications both inside and outside of the courtroom. Topics addressed include the relationship between metaphor and analogy in legal reasoning, metaphors of proportionality, metaphors in legal education and scholarship, law itself as a metaphor, and many more. Scholarly and thought-provoking, Law’s Metaphors offers illuminating insights into the prevalence and power of metaphor in the legal arena.