Shakespeare was fascinated by law, which permeated Elizabethan everyday life. The general impression one derives from the analysis of many plays by Shakespeare is that of a legal situation in transformation and of a dynamically changing relation between law and society, law and the jurisdiction of Renaissance times. Shakespeare provides the kind of literary supplement that can better illustrate the legal texts of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There was a strong popular participation in the system of justice, and late sixteenth-century playwrights often made use of forensic models of narrative. Uncertainty about legal issues represented a rich potential for causing strong reactions in the public, especially feelings concerning the resistance to tyranny. The volume aims at highlighting some of the many legal perspectives and debates emplotted in Shakespearean plays, also taking into consideration the many texts that have been produced during the latest years on law and literature in the Renaissance.

This volume,which offers a bridge between comparative law and legal theory, centers upon debates about European legal integration, and, more generally, about the methodology of comparative law. What should be compared? Statutory rules, case law, legal history, law's political, sociological and economical environment, the ideological background of the lawyers, legal techniques, legal traditions, legal cultures, etc.? This question is at the core of many current debates and is discussed in many of the papers contained in this volume. The contributors all attempt to locate law in its context, and adopt a more theoretical and interdisciplinary approach to making comparisons. In taking an interdisciplinary approach many of the contributors look at our current law from the point of view of one non legal discipline, with an eye on at least some other elements of law's context: notably legal history, legal sociology (especially 'legal culture') and linguistics. They also contribute new ideas to various areas of legal theory including legal epistemology, pluralist or monist conceptions of a 'legal system', legal methodology, judicial reasoning, the theory of legal sources, and the analysis of concepts such as 'equality', 'rights', 'legal principles', 'personal rights' and 'personal identity'.

Law has long been conceived as a system and system involves order. However, the authors argue, for any system, even a legal system, to function it must also involve elements of disorder. This book investigates the systematic nature of a legal system, particularly as to the validity and interpretation of law, in four main areas: the elements of a legal system, relations among its elements, its relation to its environment and its relation to time. It is argued that, being both open and closed, self- and hetero-regulated, fixed and changing, complex and fluid, a legal system appears as a constant entangling of order and disorder. This innovative interdisciplinary study moves from traditional theory of legal system through systems theory to game theory, as well as drawing on sociology and anthropology of law.