'Just War' and Shakespeare's Henry V
Judge Theodor Meron, Visiting Professor at the Faculty of Law, will be discussing the conception of Just War in Shakespeare's Henry V with Professor Lorna Hutson, Merton Professor of English Literature at the University of Oxford. The discussion will be followed by a Q+A with the audience.
Judge Meron has been a Judge of the Appeals Chambers of the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) and the International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) since his election to the ICTY in March 2001. Judge Meron has served four terms as President of the ICTY. In December 2011, he was elected a Judge of the Mechanism for International Criminal Tribunals (MICT), for which he serves his second term as President following his appointment by the U.N. Secretary-General. A leading scholar of international humanitarian law, human rights, and international criminal law, Judge Meron is the author of a dozen books on international law and chivalry in Shakespeare and more than a hundred articles, including some of the books and articles that helped build the legal foundations for international criminal tribunals.
Lorna Hutson works on the literature of the early modern period in England and is interested in the complex interrelations of literary form and other forms of cultural practice. She has focused for some years on the shared ground between poetics and forensic rhetoric—that is, on the ways in which literary texts invite readers and audiences to supplement the text, or mis-en-scène, with inferences and imaginings that make it seem 'true to life'. Questions of guilt and innocence stimulate our imaginations and our story-making capacities: legal rhetoric thus plays an unexpectedly important role in the truth-like effects of fiction. Lorna is a Fellow of the British Academy. Her books The Invention of Suspicion (Oxford, 2007) and Circumstantial Shakespeare (Oxford, 2015) demonstrate the contribution of forensic rhetoric to literary composition and to the lifelikeness of early modern dramatic fiction. Her edited collection The Oxford Handbook of English Law and Literature, 1500-1700 (2017) has recently won the Sixteenth Century Society’s Roland Bainton prize for the best reference book.