The article focuses on the firing of a dean at Canada's University of Saskatchewan in 2014 to consider both the decidedly weak response to this event as an infringement of academic freedom protections, and the corporate instrument that was cited as the excuse for the firing, an employment contract's confidentiality clause. The central concerns are with the relationship of academic freedom to freedom of expression more generally, and the textual battle in Canada for the definition of academic freedom in which (in the face of the silence of academics at all levels) administrative imperatives shaped by a neoliberal agenda are currently dominating.
Much of the pleasure of Shakespeare’s comedy for early modern audiences derived from its invitation to them to understand the English common law as a law of ‘common reason’ arising from the people in their aggregate. The Comedy of Errors appeals to the audience to construe the ‘errors’ of the law in order to affirm the collective rationality of audiences as law-maker, while The Merchant of Venice’s trial scene affirms the importance of the ideals of common law jurisprudence by showing them abused. And in Measure for Measure’s extended spectacle of judicial authority in Act 5, the audience experiences the importance of the common law as a ‘discoursive’ phenomenon dependent upon the participation of the community for its vitality. Together the plays put audiences into active relation to law as it appeals to them as the common law’s makers.
The chapter situates one of the first known printed books of verse by an Englishwoman, Isabella Whitney’s Sweet Nosgay or Pleasant Posye (1573), in relation to one of the watershed legal developments of the sixteenth century, the Statute of Wills (1540), and a case reported by Edmund Plowden in his Commentaries (1571, 1579), Paramour v. Yardley, to establish the political character of the book’s final poem, its ‘Wyl to London.’ In the face of legal developments that supported a culture of ownership, especially in relation to land-holding arrangements, the poem manifests literature’s importance to a countervailing culture of holding things in common.
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