Practising Equity, Addressing Law. Equity in Law and Literature

This volume collects 23 papers from an eponymous May 2007 international conference held in Verona, Italy, on the concept of equity as it appears in law and in literature in legal, ethical, linguistic, and literary manifestations. Topics include linguistic analysis of the terms "equity," "equitable," and "just;" Platonic understandings of equity as an infraction to the strict rule of justice; the implications of the spatial understandings of the "law" as "something laid down" and "equity" as "even surface, level;" the jurisprudential roots of women's persecution in Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall; the discretionary risk of equity in the "post 9/11 world;" equity and human rights under international law; equity and ethics in cosmopolitanism; the reciprocal influence of Shakespearean drama and Elizabethan constitutional law; equity and Edmund Spenser's allegorical dramatization of the trial of Mary Stuart; the treatment of equity issues in Shakespeare's Hamlet, As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice; contractual thinking in the conceptualization of love and justice in The Merchant of Venice; Adam Smith's use of equity as a general principle of law; equity applied to problems of private property and justice in the 18th century novel; equity and the law in Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities; the concept of equity in Tim Park's novel Judge Savage; the relationship between truth and justice in P. D. James' novel A Certain Justice; and a corpus-based analysis of equity in judgments issued by the Chancery Division of the High Court of England and Wales