Law's Cosmos: Juridical Discourse in Athenian Forensic Oratory

by Victoria Wohl

• ISBN13: 9780521110747
• ISBN10: 0521110742
• Edition: 1st
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2010-02-08
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

Recent literary-critical work in legal studies reads law as a genre of literature, noting that Western law originated as a branch of rhetoric in classical Greece and lamenting the fact that the law has lost its connection to poetic language, narrative, and imagination. But modern legal scholarship has paid little attention to the actual juridical discourse of ancient Greece. This book rectifies that neglect through an analysis of the courtroom speeches from classical Athens, texts situated precisely at the intersection between law and literature. Reading these texts for their subtle literary qualities and their sophisticated legal philosophy, it proposes that in Athens' juridical discourse literary form and legal matter are inseparable. Through its distinctive focus on the literary form of Athenian forensic oratory, Law's Cosmos aims to shed new light on its juridical thought, and thus to change the way classicists read forensic oratory and legal historians view Athenian law.

Author Biography

Victoria Wohl is Professor of Classics at the University of Toronto.

Table of Contents

Preface: before the law	p. ix
Introduction: the rhetoric of law	p. 1
The Boundaries of Legal Discourse
The world of law: oratory and authority	p. 21
On the inside	p. 21
Nomos, demos, polis	p. 26
Rhetoric's unhappy consciousness (Aeschines 1)	p. 37
The iron chain of law (Demosthenes 25)	p. 50
Legal violence and the limit of justice	p. 66
Law in a field of pain and death	p. 66
Legal violence and social violence (Demosthenes 54)	p. 71
Touchstone of violence (Antiphon 1)	p. 82
At the limits of the law (Demosthenes 47)	p. 98
The Legal Subject
Legal fictions: subjects probable and improbable	p. 115
The legal subject	p. 115
The intentional subject (Tetralogy II)	p. 121
The probable subject (Tetralogy I)	p. 133
Legal anthropology (Tetralogy III)	p. 145
Logos biou: law's life stories	p. 155
Tropes of subjectivity	p. 155
Am I that name? Semiotics of the homonym in Demosthenes 39	p. 158
The contract and the courtesan: metaphors of self in Demosthenes 48	p. 167
Impossible metonymies (Lysias 24 via Demosthenes 21)	p. 181
Time, Memory, Reproduction: Law's Past and Future
Civic amnesia and legal memory: to remember and forget in the lawcourts	p. 201
Athens' amnesty and law's al?theia	p. 201
Litigating across l&ebar;th&ebar; (Andocides 1)	p. 206
Time on trial (Lysias 13)	p. 217
Traumatic memory and legal historiography (Lysias 12)	p. 226
Family/law: legal genealogies	p. 243
Narrative of a family tree	p. 243
Law's full house	p. 250
Living will (Isaeus 1)	p. 257
Feminine fictions and the genealogy of law (Isaeus 3 and 6)	p. 268
Conclusion: the paradigmatic law	p. 287
Law, code	p. 287
The law of law (Demosthenes 24)	p. 292
The letter of the law and its spirit (Lysias 10)	p. 301
The law, the noose, and the one-eyed man	p. 309
Bibliography	p. 317
Index locorum	p. 345
General index	p. 354
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