Cristina Costantini (University of Bergamo) has posted Equity's Different Talks on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This paper investigates the fundamental ambiguity that lays at the roots of Equity - both as a word and as a set of ideas - so to explain and justify its wandering soul, its hybrid nature and genealogy. Moving from a kind of foucaultian archeology, the Author comes to highlight the peculiarities of English Legal System, where the original complexities resulted in a real antagonism among different institutions, converting the ontological dispute in a matter of Politics. In this perspective, English Equity, developed from the intersection of Greek, Roman and Christian traditions, represented the perfect and powerful embodiment of the paradigm of 'political theology'. On this ground, the Author suggests her original interpretation of the political structure of the English Equity jurisdiction as a kind of not only institutionalized, but also naturalized power to decide the state of exception at the aim to reassert the sovereignty of the Crown against conflicting powers. In a theological perspective English Equity became a kind of desacralized shekinah deputed to unveil the Common Law's withdrawal. On a methodological level this paper focuses on the importance of the interdisciplinary approach (Law and Politics, Law and Literature, Law and Theology) for the subtle comprehension of the different languages, rhetoric, aesthetics that shape and legitimate the declaration of Law.
