As human rights institutions and legal frameworks are discredited, defunded, dismantled, and openly ignored across multiple national contexts, the question of what literature has to do with law and rights returns with new urgency. This seminar brings together new work in comparative literature, legal studies, and cultural history to explore the relationship between literary representation and the social and legal issues that shape people's lives and the claims they are able to make.

Across periods, regions, and genres, literary texts have served as powerful sites for examining legal institutions, rights, social inequalities, political conflicts, and questions of justice. Rather than treating literature as a passive reflection of the world it comes from, this seminar investigates how literary works engage with, critique, and reimagine legal and social frameworks, both those of their own time and those that still shape our present.

How does literature respond to systems of law and governance? In what ways do novels, poems, plays, and other cultural forms expose social injustices, challenge dominant legal narratives, or imagine alternative forms of justice? What can literary texts reveal about lived experiences that legal records and official histories often obscure? Through which literary and aesthetic strategies are such lived experiences narrated? And how might these forms widen our sense of who, or what, can stand before the law and make a claim on it, and of what justice could mean beyond the limits of the law?

Possible topics include literary engagements with human rights; representations of crime and punishment; slavery and abolition; gender and legal identity; colonialism and imperial law; migration, citizenship, and statelessness; genocide and state violence; surveillance and state power; environmental justice; and literature's role in documenting or contesting social change. Contributions may focus on individual texts, comparative case studies, transnational perspectives, or theoretical approaches that bring together literary criticism, legal studies, philosophy, and cultural theory. Comparative and multilingual work is especially encouraged, as is attention to traditions underrepresented in the field.

By placing literary texts in dialogue with the legal and social conditions from which they emerge, this seminar seeks to illuminate the enduring capacity of literature to interrogate power, challenge inequality, and imagine more equitable futures.