B029842 - LAW AND LITERATURE

Italian

The course will provide an in-depth analysis of artistic works that prove to be fundamental for a jurist’s humanistic education. By directly managing the works of art, students will be scrutinizing the relationships between art and law, justice and vengeance as well as non-violence-based forms of justice.
Thus, students will deepen the knowledge of these artistic masterpieces and create a connection with their own experiences and sensibilities.

- Sofocle, Antigone;
- Eschilo, Orestea
- Shakespeare, Hamlet;
- Franz Kafka, In the penal colony

Knowledge
The main goal of the course is to provide students with a wide panoramic of the current intersection and interaction paths between law and art (including literature, paintings, music, photography and cinema), allowing them to gain a deep understanding of the law. The course will be critic towards an approach solely based on judicial technicism; its standpoint, on the contrary, will focus on the ethical, social and constitutional dimension of the law.

Skills
Creating an ethic of participation; exercising the art of doubt, the sense of limit and, ultimately, one own’s balance and reasonability as main skills of a jurist and main components of the community justice.

Capabilities
Ability to analyze a work of art and to delve into the human dimension it symbolizes.
Ability to understand the ethic-social dynamics and grounds of conflicts as they are sublimated by art.
Ability to develop the legal logic in its technical but also constitutional meaning.
Ability to think and justify one own’s positions.

None

A total amount of 48 hours of lessons

Co-teaching with Dr. Gianluca Russo

The final exam consists in an oral examination, both for attending and for non-attending students. Before the oral exam, furthermore, students (also in pair or small groups) will have to deliver a paper on an artistic piece of their choosing, in which they are expected to develop personal thoughts also, but non only, in relation to the contents of the course.

Grade is assigned according to the following parameters:
- knowledge of the texts and the themes that have been developed during the course;
- capability to organize discursively one own’s reasoning;
- clearness in the oral exposition and argumentation;
- use of proper legal language;
- ability of critical reasoning.

Following a first introduction to the relationships between “law” and “art” as typical human disciplines, the course will be dedicated to the study of artistic representations of both the relationship between justice and violence and the nonviolence-based forms of social justice.
To this end, the course will first of all focus on a fundamental text of the classic Greek tragedy, namely the Orestea. Later on, students will be asked to analyze Shakespeare’s “Hamlet” and Kafka’s “In the penal colony”, since these works of art are, indeed, of the utmost importance for every student to become aware of the component of violence upon which relies justice. the development in every student of a real humanistic sensibility.
During the whole course, students will have to work directly on the texts and will be constantly interacting with the professors; also, they will have to identify and autonomously explain the main themes emerging from the above-mentioned works of art.

This course contributes to the achievement of the goals of the UN 2030 Agenda for a Sustainable Development, with particular reference to goal nr. 16 – Peace, justice and strong institutions.