Andrew Majeske

John Jay College of Criminal Justice | John Jay CUNY · English

The Idea of Justice has been percolating for some time. The essays by Amartya Sen and George Anastaplo featured in this special issue derive from addresses presented at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice Third Biennial Literature and Law Conference, held in March of 2012 in New York City. The theme of that conference was The Idea of Justice,...

This essay constitutes the author's eulogy for his mentor, Professor George Anastaplo.

The first section contains a review of Greta Olson's From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect, and the second section is a question and answer exchange with the author.

Both Professor Anastaplo and Professor Sen would agree that a crisis regarding justice exists in the contemporary world. Each of these scholars has endeavored in their work to address this crisis, in one way or another. For Professor Sen, the crisis is global in scope, and its solution also needs to be global. For Professor Anastaplo, the crisis of...

“Korematsu [v. United States] was gravely wrong the day it was decided, and has been overruled in the court of history, and—to be clear—has no place in law under the Constitution.” Chief Justice John Roberts, from Trump v. Hawaii (2018)

The following conversation took place on January 28, 2022 in Davis California between Margaret Ferguson, David Simpson, Andrea Ross and the interviewer, NASJ editor Andrew Majeske (AM). Margaret Ferguson (MF), Professor Emerita at UC Davis, is author of Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender and Empire in Early Modern England and France, as well as oth...

America faces a crisis it shares with the rest of the world: the ecological crisis of accelerating climate change caused by human activity in the Anthropocene. I interviewed renowned science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson who has been thinking about possible ways to address global warming for decades. His work, which comprises novels like Mini...

This is an advance review of Greta Olson's book From Law and Literature to Legality and Affect, published by Oxford University Press in October 2022.

This essay initially identifies and explores issues relating to relativity and relativism in cultural and political matters. It highlights the problematic character of the prime virtue that liberals claim to be the product of this relativistic outlook, tolerance, and points out that relativism equally supports illiberal agendas, as emphasized by Be...

This essay discusses the right of confrontation generally by contrasting its fundamental import to Anglo-American legal systems with its more recent rise in significance in Continental European ones, before focusing narrowly upon a particular exception to the right of confrontation called the dying declaration. This essay analyzes a highly unusual...

This book accounts for the previously inadequately explained transformation in the meaning of equity in sixteenth century England, a transformation which, intriguingly, first comes to light in literary texts rather than political or legal treatises. The book address the two principal literary works in which the transformation becomes apparent, Thom...

A wide range of critics have read Measure for Measure as though the legal concept of equity played a critical role in the drama. This essay argues that equity, at least as that concept is understood by such critics, is absent from the play for an important reason: Duke Vincentio's overarching objective is to reestablish the rule of law in Vienna-in...

Jeffrey Archer's latest book is an eminently useful compendium — in his editor's words, a "lexical archive" — of language in Shakespearean plays that relates in various ways to citizens, their affairs, citizenship, and things against which citizens identify themselves, especially non-citizen Londoners of provincial and foreign origin (xii). The thr...

This article examines equity's enigmatic treatment in Book V of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene. It focuses on the central Isis Church passage, in which the Isis priest beguiles Britomart into believing that equity constitutes a subtle power women can exercise over men—but only from behind the scenes rather than in a ruling role. Britomart's fin...