Gender and cultural studies readings of Tennessee Williams’s work have provided diverse perspectives on his complex representations of sexuality, whether of himself as an openly gay man, or of his characters, many of whom narrate or dramatize sexual attitudes or behavior that cross heteronormative boundaries of the mid-century period. Several of these studies have positioned Williams and his work amid the public tensions in American life over roughly four decades, from 1940–1980, as notions of equality and freedom of choice challenged prejudice and repression in law and in society. To date, however, neither Williams’s homosexuality nor his persistent representations of sexual transgressions have been examined as legal matters that challenged the rule of law. Directed by legal history and informed by multiple strands of Williams’s studies criticism, textual, and cultural, this book explores the interplay of select topics defined and debated in law’s texts with those same topics in Williams’s personal and imaginative texts. By tracing the obscure and the transparent representations of homosexuality, specifically, and diverse sexualities more generally, through selected stories and plays, the book charts the intersections between Williams’s literature and the laws that governed the period. His imaginative works, backlit by his personal documents and historical and legal records from the period, underscore his preoccupation with depictions of diverse sexualities throughout his career. His use of legal language and its varied effects on his texts demonstrate his work’s multiple and complex intersection with major twentieth-century concerns, including significant legal and cultural dialogues about identity formation, intimacy, privacy, and difference.

The book is a work of non-fiction. The book is a historical analysis of the evolution of a uniquely American constitutionalism that began with the original English royal charters for the exploration and exploitation of North America. When the U.S. Constitution was written in 1787, the accepted conception of a constitution was that of the British constitution, upon which the colonists had relied in asserting their rights with respect to the imperium, comprised of ancient documents, parliamentary enactments, administrative regulations, judicial pronouncements, and established custom. Of equal significance, the laws comprising the constitution did not differ from other statutes and as a consequence, there was no law endowed with greater sanctity than other legislative enactments. In framing the revolutionary state constitutions following the retreat of the crown governments in the colonies, as well as the later federal Constitution, the Revolutionaries fundamentally reconceived a constitution as being the single authoritative source of fundamental law that was superior to all other statutes, regulations, and judicial decisions, that was ratified by the states and that was subject to revision only through a formal amendment process. This new constitutional conception has been hailed as the great innovation of the revolutionary period, and deservedly so. This American constitutionalism had its origins in the now largely overlooked royal charters for the exploration of North America beginning with the charter granted to Sir Humphrey Gilbert by Elizabeth I in 1578. The book follows the development of this constitutional tradition from the early charters of the Virginia Companies and the covenants entered of the New England colonies, through the proprietary charters of the Middle Atlantic colonies. On the basis of those foundational documents, the colonists fashioned governments that came to be comprised not only of an executive, but an elected legislature and a judiciary. In those foundational documents and in the acts of the colonial legislatures, the settlers sought to harmonize their aspirations for just institutions and individual rights with the exigencies and imperatives of an alien and often hostile environment. When the colonies faced the withdrawal of the crown governments in 1775, they drew on their experience, which they formalized in written constitutions. This uniquely American constitutional tradition of the charters, covenants and state constitutions was the foundation of the federal Constitution and of the process by which the Constitution was written and ratified a decade later.

Monsters, Law, Crime, an edited collection composed of essays written by prominent U.S. and international experts in Law, Criminology, Sociology, Anthropology, Communication and Film, constitutes a rigorous attempt to explore fertile interdisciplinary inquiries into “monsters” and “monster-talk,” and law and crime. This edited collection explores and updates contemporary discussions of the emergent and evolving frontiers of monster theory in relation to cutting-edge research on law and crime as extensions of a Gothic Criminology. This theoretical framework was initially developed by Caroline Joan “Kay” S. Picart, a Philosophy and Film professor turned Attorney and Law professor, and Cecil Greek, a Sociologist (Picart and Greek 2008). Picart and Greek proposed a Gothic Criminology to analyze the fertile synapses connecting the “real” and the “reel” in the flow of Gothic metaphors and narratives that abound around criminological phenomena that populate not only popular culture but also academic and public policy discourses. Picart's edited collection adapts the framework to focus predominantly on law and the social sciences.

Tennessee Williams, T-shirt Modernism and the Refashionings of Theater reappraises the received wisdom that Williams’s work fell into decline in the late 1960 as the Naturalism he was associated with, not always through his own choice, was replaced by European theatrical experimentalism and as culture saw a lifting of sexual restrictions. It suggests, instead, that Williams was always experimental, always more Chekhov than Ibsen, a lyrical playwright inflected with the poetry of Harte Crane, and that his late plays are as central to Williams’s reshaping of American theater as those works of the immediate post–World War II era that brought him fame and fortune. Its general aim, then, is to engage the perception that “Tennessee Williams is the greatest unknown playwright America has produced” (David Savran, City University of New York). In many respects the work of Tennessee Williams, after a protracted period of neglect, is primed for reappraisal , reinterpretations and, subsequently, re-stagings. This work is part of that process, academically at very least, but performatively as well as academic reinterest often regenerates theatrical reinterest.

Gender Justice and the Law presents a collection of essays that examines how gender, as a category of identity, must continually be understood in relation to how structures of inequality define and shape its meaning. It asks how notions of “justice” shape gender identity and whether the legal justice system itself privileges notions of gender or is itself gendered. Shaped by politics and policy, Gender Justice essays contribute to understanding how theoretical practices of intersectionality relate to structures of inequality and relations formed as a result of their interaction. Given its theme, the collection’s essays examine theoretical practices of intersectional identity at the nexus of “gender and justice” that might also relate to issues of sexuality, race, class, age, and ability.

The Lure of Hope portrays a snap shot of the rise and fall of commercial surrogacy in India. By chance, the author’s fieldwork began around the same time NSW legislation in Australia extended its ban on commercial surrogacy to include overseas arrangements. Not long after returning from fieldwork in India, the Home Ministry of India changed the conditions of entry for intending parents (IPs) traveling to India for a surrogacy arrangement. From November 2013 IPs would have to apply for a medical visa, and could only obtain a medical visa for surrogacy if they had been married for at least two years. In 2016 the Indian Surrogacy (regulation) Act was introduced, commercial surrogacy was banned and foreigners were no longer able to enter into surrogacy arrangements in India. India was the first among a trail of ‘pop up’ reproductive destinations including Thailand, Nepal, Mexico, Cambodia and Laos. This book captures a moment in the recent history of the emerging global ‘surroscape’.Alongside the detailed account of the experiences of parents and surrogate mothers the author offers a careful analysis of regulatory systems governing surrogacy and embryo use in Australia and India. With the authors archival research in the UK she further analyses the regulation of surrogacy with cross cultural comparison of the relatively longer history of surrogacy regulation in the UK. Reproductive technologies and the many options these create are ahead of the law and while the law struggles to keep up we have a rich field of investigation. What do different regulatory systems tell us about how we see society, children, women’s bodies, reproduction and fecundity, kinship and family formation?

In No Place for Ethics, Hill argues that contemporary judicial review by the U.S. Supreme Court rests on its mistaken positivist understanding of law—law simply because so ordered—as something separate from ethics. Further, to assert any relation between the two is to contaminate both, either by turning law into an arm of ethics, or by making ethics an expression of law. This legal positivism was on full display recently when the Supreme Court declared that the CDC was acting unlawfully by extending the eviction moratorium to contain the spread of the Covid-19 Delta variant, something that, the Court admitted, was of indisputable benefit to the public. How mistaken however to think that acting for the good of the public is to act unlawfully when actually it is to act ethically and must therefore be lawful. To address this mistake, Hill contends that an understanding of natural law theory provides the basis for a constitutive relation between ethics and law without confusing their distinct role in answering the basic question, how should I behave in society? To secure that relation, the Court has an overriding responsibility when carrying out its review to do so with reference to normative ethics from which the U.S. Constitution is derived and to which it is accountable. While the Constitution confirms, for example, the liberty interests of individuals, it does not originate those interests which have their origin in human rights that long preceded it. Essential to this argument is an appreciation of ethics as objective and based on principles, like those of justice, truth, and reason that ought to inform human behavior at its very springs. Applied in an analysis of five major Supreme Court cases, this appreciation of ethics reveals how wrongly decided these cases are.

This book provides academics and lay persons with Kafkaesque readings of our memories of the 2007 Nisour Square shootings in Iraq. The author uses critical analyses of the rise of Blackwater, support for private security firms and private contracting, prosecutorial and defense preparations and the 2014 jury trial to argue that most observers have drastically underestimated the groundswell of support that existed for Erik Prince and many other defenders of military or security outsourcing. This book puts on display the cultural, legal, and political difficulties that confronted those who wanted to try former Blackwater security guards in the name of belated social justice.

This book looks at the architecture of the courts in Scotland and the importance of these civic spaces. Given the importance of courts to the legal experience it starts by exploring why scholars have been so reticent in examining spaces in which the administration of justice takes place. It notes the major changes already unfolding in Scotland and puts these into a historical and cultural context. The authors trace the emergence of the notion of the dedicated courtroom space in 19th century Scotland and the ways in which the courtroom setting affected the exercise of power through law. They show what factors led to the adoption of different architectural styles. They examine the changes in the legal, political and social world which drove such changes and how these changed in the 20th and 21st centuries. They also examine the symbolic functions of courts both internally and externally. They note the changes in the decision-makers and their goals in the 21st century and how this will lead to a very different kind of courtroom in the near future. They examine the wider factors affecting the process of litigation and trends in dispute resolution. They conclude that the goals of transparency and civil dignity have serious implications for the kinds of spaces which will serve as halls of justice in the future. Since these are driven, it seems, by financial imperatives it does not bode well for the retention of civic pride and community which the courts of justice might be said to embody.

Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration works from the premise that if the law establishes and maintains both its practical and symbolic authority on the basis of its monopoly on legally sanctioned violence and the suffering threatened and delivered by such violence, then we cannot know the full human cost or concrete moral status of any legal state without human witness to the depth and manner of suffering meted out by such violence. The prison writer stands in the position to offer such witness. The prison writer knows the law’s violence in the flesh. For every other writer, reflection upon the degree and manner of suffering meted out under legal sanction—that is, reflection upon the full human cost of the contemporary legal order—is necessarily speculative. In close readings of first-person witness from prisons in the U.S., Ireland, and Africa, Witness in the Era of Mass Incarceration discovers literary tropes that chart at once local, national, and transnational conditions of carceral experience—the extant conditions of legalized suffering. In exhibiting the labor required to move from institutionalized abjection to the minimum requirements of rights-bearing personhood, this witness offers the sole credible vision of the possubility of a post carceral understanding of freedom.