Slippery Supplements: Law, History, Text, Professor Ian Ward

The first part of this paper will explore some of the so-called ‘strategies’ of literary jurisprudence, variously poetic and philosophic, before paying closer attention to the prospective value of the literary text as a historical supplement. Along the way it will contemplate vying conceptions of truth in legal and literary conversation. The second part will then revisit some texts, drawn from Roman as well as early modern English law, which present themselves as supplementary inscriptions, of a distinctly slippery kind.

Bio

Professor Ian Ward's principal area of research expertise lies at the intersection of law, literature and history. Over the last few years his research had focussed more closely on associated areas of early modern English and Roman law and literature. His The Trials of King Charles I will be published by Bloomsbury later this year. He is presently writing a book provisionally entitled The Reformation of the English Constitution, which focusses on the constitutional crisis which engulfed England in the final quarter of the sixteenth and the first quarter of the seventeenth centuries. Ian is also working on a series of articles which explore the literary jurisprudence of Augustan Rome, and more particularly its reception during the English Renaissance.