Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its succession. The increasing power of the dead under law in the US, the UK, and beyond-a concern of recent volumes in law and social sciences-is here addressed through a distinctive approach based on law and humanities. Vividly treating literary and biblical battles of will, the book suggests approaches to legal constitution informed by these dramas and by English legal history. This study investigates correlations between the will of God in Judeo-Christian traditions and the Last Wills of humans, especially dominant males, in cultures where these traditions have developed. It is interdisciplinary, in the sense that it engages with the limits of several fields: it is informed by humanities critical theory, especially Benjaminian historical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but refrains from detailed theoretical considerations. Dramatic narratives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton are read as suggesting real possibilities for alternative inheritance (i.e., constitutional) regimes. As Jenkins shows, these texts propose ways to alleviate violence, violence both personal and political, through attention to inheritance law.

In this work, Alex Davis explores how inheritance was imagined between the lifetimes of Chaucer and Shakespeare.

Shakespeare's Law is a critical overview of law and legal issues within the life, career, and works of William Shakespeare as well as those that arise from the endless array of activities that happen today in the name of Shakespeare. Mark Fortier argues that Shakespeare’s attitudes to law are complex and not always sanguine, that there exists a deep and perhaps ultimate move beyond law very different from what a lawyer or legal scholar might recognize. Fortier looks in detail at the legal issues most prominent across Shakespeare’s work: status, inheritance, fraud, property, contract, tort (especially slander), evidence, crime, political authority, trials, and the relative value of law and justice. He also includes two detailed case studies, of The Merchant of Venice and Measure for Measure, as well as a chapter looking at law in works by Shakespeare's contemporaries. The book concludes with a chapter on the law as it relates to Shakespeare today. The book shows that the legal issues in Shakespeare are often relevant to issues we face now, and the exploration of law in Shakespeare is as germane today, though in sometimes new ways, as in the past.

Through an examination of five plays by Shakespeare, Paul Raffield analyses the contiguous development of common law and poetic drama during the first decade of Jacobean rule. The broad premise of The Art of Law in Shakespeare is that the 'artificial reason' of law was a complex art form that shared the same rhetorical strategy as the plays of Shakespeare. Common law and Shakespearean drama of this period employed various aesthetic devices to capture the imagination and the emotional attachment of their respective audiences. Common law of the Jacobean era, as spoken in the law courts, learnt at the Inns of Court and recorded in the law reports, used imagery that would have been familiar to audiences of Shakespeare's plays. In its juridical form, English law was intrinsically dramatic, its adversarial mode of expression being founded on an agonistic model. Conversely, Shakespeare borrowed from the common law some of its most critical themes: justice, legitimacy, sovereignty, community, fairness, and (above all else) humanity. Each chapter investigates a particular aspect of the common law, seen through the lens of a specific play by Shakespeare. Topics include the unprecedented significance of rhetorical skills to the practice and learning of common law (Love's Labour's Lost); the early modern treason trial as exemplar of the theatre of law (Macbeth); the art of law as the legitimate distillation of the law of nature (The Winter's Tale); the efforts of common lawyers to create an image of nationhood from both classical and Judeo-Christian mythography (Cymbeline); and the theatrical device of the island as microcosm of the Jacobean state and the project of imperial expansion (The Tempest).

John Milton is widely known as the poet of liberty and freedom. But his commitment to justice has been often overlooked. As Alison A. Chapman shows, Milton’s many prose works are saturated in legal ways of thinking, and he also actively shifts between citing Roman, common, and ecclesiastical law to best suit his purpose in any given text. This book provides literary scholars with a working knowledge of the multiple, jostling, real-world legal systems in conflict in seventeenth-century England and brings to light Milton’s use of the various legal systems and vocabularies of the time—natural versus positive law, for example—and the differences between them. Surveying Milton’s early pamphlets, divorce tracts, late political tracts, and major prose works in comparison with the writings and cases of some of Milton’s contemporaries—including George Herbert, John Donne, Ben Jonson, and John Bunyan—Chapman reveals the variety and nuance in Milton’s juridical toolkit and his subtle use of competing legal traditions in pursuit of justice.

This book discusses the law of inheritance and administration of deceased estates in Malawi. Its coverage includes basic concepts underlying inheritance; history of law of inheritance in Malawi; Will-making and testate inheritance; intestate inheritance; pension and inheritance of pension benefits and life insurance policies; other forms of inheritance like promissory estoppel, donationes mortis causa, rule in Strong v Bird and mutual Wills; estate duty; grants and personal representatives; and administration of deceased estates. Key statutes discussed include Constitution of Malawi, Deceased Estates (Wills, Inheritance and Protection) Act, Pensions Act, Estate Duty Act and Trustees Act. The book is designed as a reference for judicial officers, legal practitioners, public officers and administrators of deceased estates, law students, policy and legislative makers, pension fund managers, civil society activists (particularly on children and women’s rights) and interested academics.

Challenges to Legal Theory offers the reader a fascinating journey through a variety of multi-disciplinary topics, ranging from law and literature, and law and religion, to legal philosophy and constitutional law. The collection reflects some of the challenges that the field of legal theory currently faces. It is compiled by a selection of international and Spanish scholars, whose essays are made available in English translation for the first time. The volume is based on a collection of essays, published in Spanish, in honour of Professor José Iturmendi Morales, of Complutense University, Madrid, and brings the rich scholarship of pre-eminent Spanish scholars of law and legal theory to an international audience.