Introduction

This chapter aims to position law and video games as an emerging and promising sub-field of law and humanities scholarship. Video games, sometimes referred to as ‘computer games’, ‘digital games’ or ‘electronic games’, have garnered an immense following, captivating billions of players worldwide and generating nearly $200 billion in revenue in 2022 alone. Despite the widespread popularity and significant market presence of video gaming, law and humanities scholarship has largely overlooked the exploration of video games as rich cultural artefacts with legal entanglements. Or perhaps, if there has been interest, the modal peculiarities of video games have acted as a deterrent for legal scholars to tackle them as a site of analysis.

Fortunately, within the field of game studies or ludology, the discipline that primarily studies video games, there has been a rapid evolution of literature examining video games as objects of analysis. This vibrant body of scholarship offers valuable insights and approaches that can greatly complement and inform emerging law and video games research. This interdisciplinary dialogue between fields holds the potential to shed light on the complex legal dimensions of video games and enrich our understanding of intricate interplay between the forms. Or as Greg Lastowka puts it simply, ‘those who study games and those who study law have things to learn from another’.

How to Play: A Video Game Tutorial

While it may seem trite to provide an explanation of the video game medium within this chapter, assuming familiarity may do a disservice to potential entrants into the field who haven’t yet had much exposure to the wonderful world of video games or may not have directly experienced their components for themselves. Unlike literature, art, music and film, video games occupy a somewhat niche space due to their historical reliance special-ised hardware – such as a console or gaming PCs – for play. However, with the advent of smartphones, video games have become increasingly accessible to a wider audience.

Video games resist simple definitions due to the fluidity of their constituent parts – they are multimodal combinations that may contain aspects of code, art, music, text, cinematic cut scenes, gameplay mechanics and narrative, which are combined to engage a person in play. Through these interactive experiences, players navigate virtual spaces, solve puzzles, combat enemies and manipulate avatars or in-game objects in pursuit of the game’s objectives.

Part I: On the Question of Canonicity

One question that dominated many of the papers and conversations that took place at the 25th anniversary of the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and Humanities (LCH) annual conference, hosted by the University of Toronto in Canada on 22–23 June 2023, was whether there is (or should be) a law and humanities canon? I spoke directly to this question on a panel with James Martel and Hyo Yoon Kang on the first morning of the conference. This question was picked up by many others during the two days, including past LCH president Susan Heinzelman in the plenary session entitled ‘LCH at 25: Looking Back, Thinking Forward’.

The question of canonicity as it relates to law and humanities scholarship is very relevant to this current collection of essays edited by Newman and Sandberg as it attempts to add to, or intervene into, the established law and humanities canon (if there is one), and thus must be interrogated for the message and power it holds in that regard. In my conference paper, which closely followed the argument set out in my published Commentary, I imagined law and humanities not as a ‘canon’ per se but as a ‘field without a canon’, or a canon that resists canonisation. I argued that arts and humanities–based practices utilised in legal research and teaching expose the law and humanities ‘canon’ to its dual (and somewhat contradictory) nature, as that which continually strains towards a pre-established archive, but must also leap ahead fearlessly to properly defy disciplinary boundaries and move the field beyond siloed thinking. This, to my mind, is one of the preliminary aims of law and humanities interdisciplinary scholarship and pedagogy. These practices consist not of a stable collection of set texts but instead signify a process of experimentation that is ever in flux and alive to possibility. It is this process of discovering new arts and humanities–based practices that ensures law and humanities remains a vibrant, yet ever-changing, field for years to come.

Canonisation, in its establishment of a field of intellectual thought that defines its parameters or the importance of certain texts and core issues at stake, invites community and consensus.

Introduction

This chapter looks at law and philosophy as it appears in the Law School. In contrast with some of the chapters in this volume, which consider emerging or prospective links between law and a humanities subject, law and philosophy are already closely bound together and have been a prominent part of the legal academy. They are bound by a shared interest in justice: probing relationships between state and citizen, unpicking the rules people are expected to live by and, centrally, exploring how to govern fairly. Concerns around justice are prominent philosophical concerns and play a central role in political philosophy, with justice central to debates in ethics as it looks at values, right and wrong action, obligations and rights. Within law, the field of legal philosophy takes its interest in what the law is and ought to be, which again brings justice concerns to the fore. Both political philosophy, which has tended to occur outside the Law School, and legal philosophy, from within, are typically brought together in the legal academy through the teaching of jurisprudence. Hence the connection between law and philosophy is firmly established with jurisprudence modules being common in Law Schools. And this impact of philosophy informs what is sometimes known as legal theory, which is the all-encompassing term for the approach that compliments and contrasts traditional black letter law.

Thus, legal theory derived at least in part from philosophy allows us to go beyond looking at the law in and of itself and ask bigger questions. As a teacher, for example, I use this theory to explore social justice, influenced by how such inquiry may explore the way law plays a role in structuring society to serve the ends of some, over others. For example, why do some people have their basic needs such as housing met while others do not? And what can be done to change things for the better? These questions can include asking how and why the law perpetuates certain structures of power. And thus, legal theorising can help us pursue issues of social justice – which can be such a powerful part of the legal academy and one of the topics that can most engage students. This gives us a means to explore the role that law plays in stratifying society along the lines of class, race and gender to name but a few prominent divisions.

This text focuses on Black Africa, that is, West, Central, and Southern Africa, areas on the continent where the population predominantly has dark-pigmented skin. I am interested in racism in the context of the US, and Black Africa is strongly connected to the US through the enslavement of Black Africans that started in the US in the 1600s. Africa is a large continent, and the area encompassing Black Africa is also large and includes hundreds of cultures and languages. Yet there are cultural similarities because trade networks spread through Black Africa well before European colonisation. Nevertheless, these cultures differ, and the scope of this study cannot accommodate a detailed look into each African culture referenced. Therefore, I focus broadly on Black Africa, but the reader should keep in mind that Black Africa is not a monolithic culture but has distinct cultures and geography.

White supremacy is referenced throughout this text. I am not using the term polemically, but I am pointing to an ideological stance that most white people agree with. White supremacy simply means that you think that white people are better, more advanced, more civilised, and naturally more intelligent. (How else could you advance or create civilisation?) This does not mean that white supremacists are Nazis who want to kill or enslave nonwhites. White supremacists are often convinced their imagination is based on historical facts and often science. My overarching aim is to show how white supremacy is commonplace in the US by examining the history of Black African objects in the US, western aesthetics, art, and the US art world in the early 1900s.

The text uses a capital T in truth to signal that this refers to the philosophical concept of a universal and infinite truth that encompasses all times and places.

In this text, certain words are dealt with in non-standard ways to draw attention to the normalisation of racism and dehumanisation of Black people. Some words are used for precision over standard use. Black is capitalised throughout the text when referring to Black people.

The N-word is referenced in quoted material only and is written as Ni[…]er(s). USians is used instead of American(s) and US instead of America because referring to the United States as ‘America’ is imprecise as there are two large continents with a small strip joining them, which are all part of the Americas.

White western art history started before the first century with the Greeks, who carved statues, laid mosaics, and constructed monuments and temples with a high degree of artistic skill. Hellenic art has a character of balance and symmetry, often following the golden ratio and producing realistic portraits of humans. Greek art and ideas about beauty set the standards for what white philosophers and scholars would call the rules of aesthetics. Art for the Greeks celebrated gods and goddesses, public figures, and the good life. However, poor and enslaved people could only interact with public works; the wealthy collected art to decorate their homes and give them status. The Romans copied Greek forms, myths and art, spreading them throughout Europe as they moved their Empire north.

The next movement in white western art is Celtic and Norse art in the early first century. This artwork is highly stylised and figurative, incorporates language elements and does have realistic figures. As with much Greek and Roman art, Celtic art often had ritual significance and reflected the people’s cosmology. Not much changed in white western art until the end of the medieval period. The 1400s began the European Renaissance, Enlightenment, industrialisation, and the formation of ideas about art and aesthetics. This is also the start of the white European Colonisation of Black Africa.

At the start of the European Renaissance, artwork imitated nature as closely as possible. The Renaissance was an era when painting became a popular artistic medium when sculpture and three-dimensional objects held primacy before. The Belgium Jan van Eyck popularised realistic oil painting in Northern Europe, which the southern Italians like Benini picked up. The subject matter of white European art during colonisation consisted of Christian stories and portraits of wealthy nobles who could afford to hire a painter. Art had been used by the Catholic church previous to this to illustrate the bible for the illiterate masses; the church-sponsored various skilled artists to create monuments to god, Jesus and the saints, so artists painted what the Catholic church desired. White western art from this time still relies on Hellenic notions of beauty and proportion but is focused on capturing life in the artwork. We see the first concern for the accuracy of representation, which is influenced by science, during this period, as scientists used illustrations for Enlightenment classification projects before photography existed.

The idea for this book is an old one. I first read V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas in the third year of my undergraduate course at Delhi University in India. I did not particularly enjoy the book then. Later, when I came to Trinidad and read it again, I found in it a reflection of my interest in Indian writing in English. The book laid emphasis on documenting the everyday lives of Indo-Trinidadians in a joint family set-up. Its use of English and the familiarity of the subject matter helped me re-discover a deep-rooted Indian culture within Trinidad.

I am a recent migrant from India to Trinidad, a non-resident Indian (NRI), who shares strong ties with my motherland through internet access and social media platforms. As such, I am part of a huge NRI population overseas, but Trinidad is not a typical sought-after destination. A majority of the NRI population resides in the Middle East, the United Kingdom and the United States of America. My distance from these ‘diasporic metropolitan centres’ provides me with a unique standpoint from where I can negotiate postcolonial and postmodern discourse away from the typified Indian diaspora critic working in the US or UK academy. However, this book is neither ostensibly about me nor my diasporic point of view.

The book references an older diaspora that came to Trinidad over 178 years ago. That diaspora is no longer a diaspora but a strong community that is deeply enmeshed in the political, economic, social and cultural life of Trinidad. Stories abound about how the Indians were tricked into coming so far from home to Trinidad, or ‘Chini-dad’ as they called it. Vijay Mishra qualifies the differences between the older and the newer diaspora as between those who could not return and for whom India became a land in their imagination, distant and pure, and those who frequently return to the homeland, replenishing their connections to an actual India. My book, in a way, seeks new ways of bridging the gaps between the older and the newer diaspora.

I contend that reading Naipaul in Trinidad has made a difference because location, in spite of recent scholarship on globalisation, has to be lived to be felt.

Introduction

There has always been a mild obsession with lists of ‘best law/lawyer films’ as a starter for any work using film in the study of law which can be found from the turn of the century up until the time of writing. There are also Guides that exist to provide law teachers with material, as well as accounts of how the justice system operates in practice. In addition the role of ideology in film continues to be a theme. Interest comes, too, from slightly unexpected quarters. The impact of film generally as well as certain specific areas like race is also encountered as is writing on strongly related areas. Originally interest in the cinematic portrayal of law and lawyers tended to focus on the traditional American courtroom drama with specific attention on two classic films. First Sidney Lumet’s 1957 film Twelve Angry Men and second Robert Mulligans 1962 offering To Kill a Mockingbird. It also started with American legal academics who had an interest in film as a cultural phenomenon. The two films, noted above, were selected by the American Film Institute as the two finest courtroom dramas, which was defined as ‘a genre of film in which a system of justice plays a critical role in the film’s narrative’; two iconic actors, Henry Fonda and Gregory Peck, standing up against all odds to support the idea of ‘justice’. Both took up an unpopular stance demonstrating the importance of a fair trial against a backdrop of prejudice. The two films are powerful pieces of social drama with life-and-death decisions. However, Henry Fonda, as Davis Juror 8, in Twelve Angry Men, was not a lawyer but a member of the jury charged with determining the guilt or innocence of a young man accused of murder.

If one is not Black African, one must be cautious when thinking about Black African art. Most of the published work about Black African art that has circulated in the west up until the 1990s was all written by white western scholars. Under the influence of white supremacy and Enlightenment ideology, white western scholars believed that they could understand Black African art better than Black Africans. The continued prejudice in the white western world means that Black African scholarship remains ignored when it pertains to Black African art, philosophy, and aesthetics. White westerners with little or no knowledge of Black African cultures they studied had two things that blocked them from understanding what they studied. ‘First, it relates to embedded prejudice, a social inheritance that human beings sometimes display even if involuntarily. The second aspect pertains to ignorance. The modernist cultural hegemony has yet to acknowledge Africa as a legitimate global force in visual arts.’

To understand Black African aesthetics, art, and culture, one needs to look to Black African scholars who are better informed than their white European counterparts. There is a danger in thinking that Black Africa is a place where everyone has the same cosmology, aesthetics, culture, and language. Africa encompasses over thirteen million square miles, four times the size of the contiguous United States. There are hundreds of languages and groups within Black Africa, so one cannot speak of the area as a homogenous whole. If one thinks about the striking differences between different areas of the United States separated by hundreds of miles, one can imagine the differences that occur in Black Africa. To understand how Black African objects in white western scholarship and art are more representative of white western culture and ideas of Black Africa and less representative of Black Africa itself, one must examine Black African ideas, scholarship, and culture. Even though Black Africa does not have a singular language and culture, there are significant similarities that represent Black African cultural threads.

In this chapter, we will explore major themes and ideas found in Black Africa concerning human existence, Truth, and beauty. This work is not a definitive presentation of Black African thought or aesthetics, but a sample of the key themes and positions Black African scholars have held regarding Black African philosophy, aesthetics, and culture.

Introduction: An English and Welsh Case Study

The interaction between law and religion differs considerably across time and space. At one extreme, there are theocracies where the religion is law and societies where religious hands shape the laws of the land. There are states where a religion or a particular religious group is afforded a protected position, be it by constitutional recognition of one religion or by the existence of concordats or treaties with them endowing upon the religion equal status to the state. Other societies bestow legal status with resulting benefits and burdens on to those that register or come within particular definitions. Others still provide for freedom of religion and belief, with protections being extended to non-religious world views and often expressed in international agreements. Some states see their role as facilitating and, where needed, regulating the religious marketplace and others see the role of the state as being neutral and/or taking a secular stance (two approaches that are not identical and not completely compatible). These are, of course, ideal types. These models rarely, if ever, exist in their idealised perfect form. In many places in many eras, several of these characteristics exist and interact uneasily. This is often the result of historical religion-state relationships failing to keep up with wider political, social and legal change. The interaction between law and religion is invariably in flux – always contestable, ever changing often in subtle sometimes unseen ways.

This chapter focuses squarely on the study of the interaction between law and religion in England and Wales in the early twenty-first century. Perhaps as a result of a lack of a single document amounting to a written constitution, a wide number and diverse variety of the ideal types described above apply in England and Wales today; often in non-ideal ways. For much of its history, English laws have been shaped by clerical hands and this continues to some extent today with bishops of the Church of England sitting in the House of Lords and representatives of that church having a special protected position on the local bodies that determine how religion is taught in schools and the laws on collective worship in schools. Education is but one example of a social function originally discharged by religions and enforced by church courts where the state has only relatively recently been active and this limits any attempt by the state to monopolise.

At the turn of the nineteenth century, Black artists, collectors, and art critics were taught that white western aesthetics, themes, materials, and artworks were the best humans could produce. Thus, as we have seen, many artists and intellectuals shunned or avoided connecting their work with Black Africa. There also existed Black artists, collectors, and critics who embraced Black African visual culture in problematic ways. During and after emerging from the Harlem Renaissance, Black artists incorporated Black African design and colours into their work. Several Black artists also appropriate Egyptian design. The use of Black African objects as subjects of artworks was not revolutionary or new in the art world. Further, these Black Harlem Renaissance artists are not entirely rejecting white western art, as white European artists already worked with Black African design in the latter 1800s. The Black artists’ turn towards Black African objects and designs demonstrates how they were searching for idyllic Black African cultures in the quest for a history that did not start with the horrors of the triangular trade of Black African people.

The artists and scholars of the Harlem Renaissance faced an impossible task as the information about Black Africa was inaccurate at best and often purposefully misleading, painting a picture of lost civilisations crumbled into cannibalistic devil-worshipping cults. There is a disconnect between appreciating Black African objects, which collectors regarded as quasireligious relics or plastic art and understanding Black African people as ignorant savages. The artists associated with the Harlem Renaissance, who claimed Black African objects as their inspiration, had complex and sometimes racist views towards Black Africans and dark-skinned Blacks in the US. Their understanding of Black Africa and its arts was based only on white supremacist aesthetics, mythology, and bad histories.

The white supremacists in the west hold power and control knowledge. In the US after the Civil War, white supremacists were eager to find new ways to control the Black population, so a great deal of education presented white western civilisation as the apex of all humankind and Black African people as the far opposite end of civilisation, i.e., animals. It should not be surprising that Black US artists, critics and collectors who had no memory of enslavement nor knew their familial history beyond their closest relatives would believe what white colonialists said about Black African people and objects.

V. S. Naipaul was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1990. Many centuries ago, Sir Walter Raleigh received his knighthood from Queen Elizabeth I in 1585. Sir V. S. Naipaul was in a long line of those who received the Order of the British Empire from the West Indies, both pre- and post-independence. In 1989, he was also awarded the Trinity Cross by the Government of Trinidad and Tobago. He called the latter the ‘greatest award’ in his life. He was happy that he received this award before the announcement by the British Queen. It made the award special in a personal way. On his way back to London from Trinidad after receiving the Trinity Cross (now the Order of the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago), Naipaul spoke to reporters at the Diplomatic Lounge at the Piarco International Airport in Trinidad. Suren Capildeo, the son of Simbhoonath Capildeo and Naipaul’s cousin brother, had recently voiced concerns regarding the continued political alienation of Indians in Trinidad. Naipaul, in response to a question, said: ‘The seeds of that (political alienation) were sown a long, long time ago in the (19)30s and 40s with the extraordinary pettiness of Indian political life and I think we’re paying the price of that pettiness’ (Cuffie 1990, p. 1). He refuted the claims of racial hostility by stating, ‘I don’t see a lot of (racial) tension here. I see a lot more community of interest and culture than most places. We certainly share a language, we share pleasures, we share an economy very much. […] I think a lot of it is in the head’ (Cuffie 1990, p. 1). This was a rare instance of Naipaul speaking benignly rather than nostalgically about Trinidad.

In Trinidad, there is a distinct bonhomie between the different races and religions, and in general, a creolised culture exists. However, this bonhomie is intermittently broken, as it was when a coup was attempted and the Trinidad Parliament was held under siege for six days in July and August of 1990. The political coup was a simultaneous attack on the Trinidad and Tobago parliament, the police headquarters, the National Broadcasting Service, Radio Trinidad and the Trinidad and Tobago Television station.

This book follows my first, Misrepresenting Black Africa in US Museums (Mullins, 2019), which looked at how Black African objects first came into the US in the late 1800s. Looking at what happened when Black African objects became part of the US art world in the early 1900s. We will explore several dimensions concerning Black African objects and white western aesthetics, and the interpretation and appropriation of these objects by western artists for public consumption after WWI. The chapters trace how western intellectuals understood Black African objects. The objective is to explore how both Black and white collectors and artists regard Black African objects in the US in the early 1900s up to the present day.

To ground the preceding chapters, it is essential to understand what beauty means in a white western context. This requires some understanding of western philosophy, the history of colonialism, and the history of Europe. This book will argue that the theft of Black African objects by white western Europeans has had a lasting effect on white western art, Black artists, and the conception of Black Africa that remains today. Furthermore, the white western understanding of Black Africa that pervades in western discourse, media, and art is a profoundly distorted understanding. Finally, to understand Black African objects or art, one must know the history of the continent that is not white mythology centred around primitivism, the area the objects or art come from, but the history of the people the artists or artesian lives within and the language of the artist or artesian who created the work.

To do this, we will do several things. (1) Explore white western aesthetic ideas and contrast them with Black African aesthetic ideas. (2) Explore the history of the use of Black African objects by white western collectors, and artists, in and around the Harlem Renaissance. (3) Explore the history of the influence of white western aesthetics on Black collectors, artists, and groups in and around the Harlem Renaissance. (4) Explore how Black African aesthetics became a white mythology, which impacts aesthetics beyond the art world through advertising, commercial popularisation with the Black Power movement, and today with films such as Black Panther and videos starring Beyonce.

As noted by Ajume Wingo, western aesthetic thought is concerned with several ideas, forms, content, and meanings which are to be contemplated by the singular, detached observer.

Introduction: Towards Legal Theology

In addition to the established field of law and religion whereby scholars study the interaction between religion and the law from a range of disciplinary perspectives, attention should also be afforded to the interaction between the disciplines of law and theology. Theology, the study of God, consists of a network of subdisciplines: in the Christian context, these include biblical theology, moral theology, ecumenical theology and so on. Each branch of theology has its own distinctive object of study, methods and purposes. For example, pneumatology studies the Holy Spirit, practical theology uses the pastoral cycle, and liberation theology seeks to transform unjust societal structures that oppress the marginalised. Each branch of theology has its own distinctive community of scholars. It is a common view (though perhaps a contested one, as between the different church traditions) that the main purpose of Christian theology is to proclaim the Gospel of Christ. The branches of theology, in turn, are vehicles for each of this core purpose.

This chapter explores how legal theology could become a branch of theology with its own distinctive objects of study, methods and purposes. What follows explores these themes, how the subdiscipline of legal theology might be defined and developed in the context of the study of the systems of law, order, and polity, of churches across the Christian traditions that deal with, for example, forms of regulation, ministry (lay or ordained), governance (institutions and functions), discipline, doctrine, worship, rites, property and external relations. It does so as to the following: (1) The object of study: legal theology should at its core be about the relationship between theology and church law – more particularly, the relationship between church law and each of the other branches of theology. (2) The method of study: legal theology may involve the theological study of church law and/or the legal study of theology using standard juristic methods (such as text and context, critical, historical, analytical) as well as methods used in the other branches of theology. (3) The purpose of study: the development of a community of scholars collaborating with a view to its impact on ecclesial practice. In each section, the potential for legal theology will be discussed by reference to three other subdisciplines of theology.

Introduction: A Developing Tune

This chapter focuses on law and music, emphasising the engagement by law and humanities scholars with popular music. It is in five parts. The first part identifies a long-standing ‘minor jurisprudence’ concerned with the parallels and cross-fertilisations between legal theorising and musicology, most often depicting judging/lawyering as forms of creative performance. In the second part it is identified that these explorations parallel more doctrinal scholarship on the legal forms – especially copyright – that surround music in the popular space. The third part discerns an area of law and popular music scholarship that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, formed from traces of textual signifiers in Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholarship and the expanding of law and literature to a broader enterprise concerned with law and popular culture. The fourth part identifies law and popular music scholarship where music is seen as a challenge to the legal orthodoxy. In this work, there is the utilisation of popular music, particularly songwriters and their lyrics, as manifesting a cultural zeitgeist: the musician as the voice of a generation in protest against a legally embedded orthodoxy. The fifth part considers a trajectory within law and popular music of construing popular music as articulating a ‘popular jurisprudence’. This focus has a connection with the earlier ‘minor jurisprudence’ of legal theory and musicology. It identifies in the cultural project of popular musicians – their lives, lyrics, videos, album art, political and cultural legacies, and social media presences – an articulation, and critique, of received legal forms. Through singing, dancing and creating in the mainstream, fundamental legalities are presented, questioned and reappropriated.

‘Minor Jurisprudence’ of Law and (Mostly Classical) Music

Law and music have a long-intertwined history. First Nations peoples of Australia describe essential legal relations with Country as ‘songlines’: that the proper relations between land, law and peoples are connected though song. In the mythmaking of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, his world and peoples and the discord they experience are constituted from the singing of ‘Great Music’ by the godhead Eru and angelic-like Ainur. However, the posited and doctrinal focus of the modern Western legal tradition has tended to be deaf to the potential foundational intertwining of law and music. Peter Goodrich has suggested: ‘Just as music has historically paid little attention to writing, law – cold prose, serious social speech – has generally marginalised music.’

The white western demand for intentional production ties into white western ideas about aesthetics. The evaluation of non-western cultural objects by white westerners at the end of the 1800s included white western ideas about society and culture. Art was not something white westerners could imagine Black Africans producing because they lived in preindustrial conditions and had no history of art. White westerners significantly portrayed Black African objects as dark occult idols or insignificant decorations at the turn of the nineteenth century.

The lack of knowledge about Black Africa and the hubris white westerners had, presuming they knew more about Black African culture than Black Africans. This led to the loss of critical information about Black African objects in the west. The white western lack of understanding is not only a result of white supremacist ideology but also because of the white western Enlightenment knowledge system of classification and ordering. The classical model of learning in the white western context leads to the specialisation of scholars who work in fragmented silos to study their chosen problem in isolation from other disciplines and methodologies than those of their ‘field’. This fragmentation of knowledge is the opposite of Black African ideas of knowledge and the reality of the world. For Black Africans, it is impossible to separate things, study them in isolation, and reach sound conclusions about the state of the objects of study.

Interdisciplinary approaches to law are now commonplace at least in terms of legal research. Although in the Anglo-American world at least such work has tended to be predominantly social scientific in focus, there has also been an increase in interdisciplinary scholarship on law that draws upon the humanities. This is most notable in the large literature on law and literature as well as the development of a number of further ‘law and’ fields. Some of these (e.g. law and history, law and religion, law and philosophy) have been long-lasting but have been revived in recent years by increased interdisciplinary collaborations while other areas (e.g. law and television, law and comics, law and music) represent new areas of interest that have seen legal scholars interact with academics from other parts of the university and with practitioners, artists and producers. These ‘law and’ fields, however, tend to exist in isolation from one another and this limits their development in that they are not able to draw upon each other’s intellectual and methodological developments and because this means that they exist as small disparate fields at the margins of law as an academic discipline.

There is now a growing number of works that pay attention to ‘law and humanities’ as a field, including a small number of specialist journals, but these typically take a thematic approach and are not particularly accessible to newcomers and to a student readership. This edited work, therefore, fulfils a real and pressing need to provide an accessible, introductory but critical guide to law and humanities as a whole by exploring how various disciplinary ‘law and’ fields have developed. Law and Humanities contributes to further scrutinising the content and role of law, and how it can contribute and be enriched by being understood within the law and humanities tradition as a whole.

This edited collection provides an accessible introduction to law and humanities. It is designed to be the first port of call for students and scholars interested in particular ‘law and’ fields and law and humanities in general. It examines a number of ‘law and’ interactions in turn (ordered alphabetically). Each chapter is written by an expert in the respective field and will explore the nature, development and possible further trajec-tory of that particular disciplinary ‘law and’ field. As editors, we have encouraged each contributor to conceptualise their own discussion of their field.