As far-right movements gain political and cultural influence across the globe amid growing concentrations of power and mounting attacks on democratic institutions, law has emerged as a central mechanism through which political authority is exercised, legitimizing various injustices. We begin from the premise that law is never merely institutional, but also cultural and imaginative. Legal authority depends on narratives, metaphors, and interpretive frameworks that define who belongs, whose testimony counts, what constitutes in/justice, and even who may be recognized as fully human. Rather than simply representing the law, literature constitutes a site of jurisprudential thinking that exposes, challenges, and reimagines the legal imaginaries through which political communities are formed.

Building on traditional approaches to law and literature, we initiate a discussion on comparative cultural jurisprudence. Placing literary and cultural traditions into dialogue across different national and ethnic contexts as well as across regions and historical periods, we aim to explore how cultural texts generate competing understandings of legal concepts. Rather than treating concepts such as citizenship, sovereignty, personhood, testimony, evidence, rights, and justice as universal legal categories, we ask how they are culturally produced, historically contingent, and continually transformed through narrative and aesthetic forms. What can comparative literature reveal about the assumptions that underwrite legal authority? How do literary traditions across borders produce competing jurisprudential visions? How do legal concepts travel, mutate, or resist translation across colonial, national, and transnational contexts? How might comparative literary inquiry illuminate both the possibilities and the limits of law as a global language of justice?

We invite papers examining literary and cultural engagements with colonialism, racial governance, authoritarianism, human rights, environmental justice, gender, indigeneity, and/or other legal formations. Topics may include literature as counter-law; fictional reconstructions of trials, court decisions, and legal histories; narratives of testimony and witnessing; diasporic negotiations of multiple legal regimes; and literary engagements with the legal dimensions of contemporary authoritarianism.

We welcome scholars working across cultural productions—literature, film, performance, visual culture—and encourage conversations among comparative literature, law and literature, postcolonial studies, critical race theory, feminist and queer theory, and related fields. By placing various traditions into dialogue, we hope to advance a comparative approach to cultural jurisprudence that understands literary and cultural production not merely as a representation, but as a mode of legal thought capable of generating alternative legal imaginaries through which justice, belonging, and political community is reimagined.