Authors:Maksymilian Del Mar, Simon Stern Pages: 1 - 10 Abstract: Whereas cognitive legal studies has attracted a considerable amount of attention from law professors over the past few decades, cognitive legal humanities (CLH) is only starting to gain traction. CLH brings together work in the cognitive sciences, the humanities, and law, focusing not so much on the prescriptive concerns that often animate research in cognitive legal studies, but on ways of enriching that vein of work—and legal scholarship more generally—by bringing the methods and materials of the humanities to bear on questions involving intention, consciousness, perception, memory, reasoning, attention, and emotion in relation to legal issues. In this introduction, we make three points about the importance of bringing the humanities into this discussion. First, the humanities can provide a vital means of historicizing cognition and its relations to law, while also prompting us to reflect on the differences among various ways of historicizing these matters. Second, the humanities offer resources for engaging with the politics of cognition and its relations to law—resources that are only rarely on display in fields such as neuroscience and cognitive psychology, and the legal scholarship that builds on them. Third, the humanities highlight the constitutive links among cognition, law, and culture, again in ways that these other fields rarely explore. After addressing these points and showing how the articles in this issue engage with them, we offer a brief summary of each article. PubDate: 2023-09-02 DOI: 10.33137/cal.v10i1.41642 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Jesús R. Velasco Pages: 11 - 26 Abstract: Entelechy is Greek for vital principle. To Aristotle, in De Anima, entelechy is the very definition of the soul, because the latter is nothing else than the vital principle of the being (to empsychon). In this article, I suggest the idea of legal entelechy to denote the kind of legal subject that comes defined as a soul, rather than as an actor or even a natural person—or a corporation. To begin the investigation into the legal entelechy I explore the affinity between the perhaps now expired science of the soul and the legal disciplines. I suggest, here, one particular aspect of the genealogy of this affinity, based on specific legal thinking in late antique and medieval Mediterranean sources from Jewish, Muslim, and Christian legal authors. Through them, we can see some of the ways in which the legal subject with a soul does political and social work. PubDate: 2023-09-02 DOI: 10.33137/cal.v10i1.41643 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Guillemette Bolens Pages: 27 - 40 Abstract: We produce kinesic specifications when we cognitively process sensorimotor concepts. For example, the sensorimotor concept of falling may be processed as a life-threatening event or a mere cause of fleeting embarrassment. This article considers the cognitive production of kinesic specifications in legal and literary reasoning, focusing on the acts of reading and judging as they appear in early modern amplifications of the Book of Genesis, written by the French poets Maurice Scève and Guillaume de Saluste Du Bartas. Because of the historically situated religious belief system of the two poets, the latter considered Adam and Eve’s act of transgression to be the cause of their own reality. By means of kinesic specifications, they narratively “fleshed out” their understanding of the Fall of mankind, evincing the role that embodied cognition and movement-based meanings play in the human ability to reason about, and understand action and causation. PubDate: 2023-09-02 DOI: 10.33137/cal.v10i1.41645 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Benedict S. Robinson Pages: 41 - 56 Abstract: This essay aims to rethink a rhetorical microgenre: the “sentence” or sententia, a brief maxim usually stating a moral principle. My aim is to show that rhetorical sentences entail more flexible cognitive and interpretive acts than has usually been recognized. I read the theory and practice of the sentence alongside that of legal maxims, arguing that these small forms can cast a useful light on each other. I focus in particular on literary characters who misuse sentences in ways that prompt inferences about them that go beyond anything they either could or would say themselves. The act of sentence-making entails a judgment that balances the content of the statement against the context in which it is made; that judgment has analogues in law, in both equitable interpretation and the theory of fictions; in literature, that legal hermeneutics is put to work for the construction of character, conscripting what cognitive science calls “mentalizing” for the projection of a kind of inwardness fashioned out of the materials of common opinion. The essay ends by arguing that connecting rhetorical sentences to legal maxims allows us to think seriously about the relationship between legal and literary fiction as it shapes Shakespeare’s Hamlet. PubDate: 2023-09-02 DOI: 10.33137/cal.v10i1.41646 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Ellen Spolsky Pages: 57 - 75 Abstract: The two genres of the title are not usually considered a pair. I argue that they share an important concern, namely, the clash between law and outlawry, city life and country life, abstraction and embodiment. The protagonists of both (often forced by the illegal actions of others) live outside the law and have to make their own laws. They often “take matters into their own hands.” Examples: paintings by Titian, Manet, Guercino, Marvell’s “The Garden,” Tasso’s Aminta, Shakespeare’s Hamlet and late plays, Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, the Coen brothers’ “True Grit,” and Jennifer Haley’s The Nether. PubDate: 2023-09-02 DOI: 10.33137/cal.v10i1.41647 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Lisa Zunshine Pages: 76 - 96 Abstract: This essay exemplifies a cognitive approach to literary and film studies, with particular emphasis on fictional reimagining of legal institutions. It draws on research of cognitive scientists who study metacognition—specifically, the difference between reflective and intuitive beliefs—to suggest that courtroom dramas, such as Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution (1957), can manipulate their viewers into believing something that they, on some level, know cannot be true. In this case, viewers accept the not guilty verdict by the jury even though “the facts in the case” are “simple” and point to the guilt of the defendant. I show how different versions of Witness for the Prosecution—from Agatha Christie’s original short story (1925) and her subsequent play based on that story (1953), to the Hollywood film (1957), and the BBC mini-series (2016)—trigger our reflective beliefs about the defendant’s innocence, so that we find the verdict satisfying (at least for a short while). I conclude by considering literary payoffs of this manipulation, especially in the context of a culture that subscribes to a view of the mind as, in principle, knowable, and thus readable by skillful others. PubDate: 2023-09-02 DOI: 10.33137/cal.v10i1.41648 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
Authors:Hannah Walser Pages: 97 - 115 Abstract: This Article identifies and historically situates “vague conduct prohibitions,” a type of criminal law that requires racialized or otherwise marginalized individuals to anticipate the inferences that a stranger or law enforcement officer would draw about their intentions. All of us—especially those of us who live in dense cities and encounter hundreds of strangers every day—need to expend some cognitive labor on routine mindreading to anticipate others’ movements, accommodate others’ needs, avoid potentially dangerous situations, and coordinate small-scale social interactions. From the Black Codes to vagrancy laws to contemporary stop-and-frisk police practices, white Americans have used vague conduct prohibitions to defray the cognitive costs of everyday mindreading by raising the stakes for any mind misreading by Black Americans. In other words, by threatening criminal consequences for Black citizens if their actions are misunderstood by whites, vague conduct prohibitions shift the mindreading burden in routine social interactions. PubDate: 2023-09-02 DOI: 10.33137/cal.v10i1.41649 Issue No:Vol. 10, No. 1 (2023)
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