Speaking the Law, Writing Justice: Dialogue between Literature, Law, and Society
Organization: Hassan I University
In a global context marked by profound transformations of democratic institutions and increasing tensions around social justice, human rights, and fundamental freedoms, the relationship between literature and law appears more crucial than ever. Confronted with the rise of authoritarian discourses, the juridification of politics, and the proliferation of censorship and control regimes, literature emerges as a critical space for speech, for narrating injustices, and for reimagining the social bond.
At the same time, contemporary research in the humanities and social sciences is paying renewed attention to the narrative and performative dimensions of law, its ability to produce meaning, shape representations, and influence subjectivities.
This conference proposes an interdisciplinary reflection on the forms and functions of justice, normativity, conflict, and reparation within literary imagination. The aim is to bring together diverse disciplinary perspectives to examine the political, symbolic, and aesthetic functions of writing and judging.
The international conference “Speaking the Law, Writing Justice: Dialogues between Literature, Law, and Society” offers a space for critical exchange on the complex interplay between legal frameworks and literary imaginaries. Moving beyond thematic or illustrative readings, the conference seeks to explore the tensions, intersections, and resonances between law as an institutional apparatus and literature as an act of language, memory, and resistance.
Following the trajectory of the Law and Literature movement, which since the 1970's has profoundly reshaped critical thought on the law-fiction relationship, this conference invites inquiry into the many ways justice and literature intersect.
What stories does literature tell about justice, its figures, and its failures? How does law become literary material, object of fiction, critique, or reinterpretation? In what ways can legal language, its rhetoric, its performativity, be read as a form of narration? What role does literature play in remembering violence, challenging established orders, imagining alternative forms of justice, and resisting censorship, silencing, or state repression? How do literary texts interrogate the norms, exclusions, and representations that law produces, or ignores?
These questions will guide the conference discussions through a diversity of critical, disciplinary, and geographical approaches.
From Greek tragedies to postcolonial narratives, figures of law populate literary landscapes. From judges to convicts, lawyers to executioners, judicial characters embody issues of equity, power, legitimacy, and symbolic violence. In Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, law confronts inner guilt; in Camus’ The Stranger, existential indifference is judged as much as the crime; Kafka’s The Trial takes legal absurdity to its extreme, depicting an opaque and tyrannical judicial system.
The courtroom; both a space for speech and a ritual, offers literature a theatrical stage of conflict, where reason and emotion, justice and injustice, face off. In Zola’s J’Accuse…!, the novelist becomes a political actor, exposing judicial injustice grounded in state anti-Semitism. In Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the courtroom becomes a space for social truth, where institutional racism is laid bare. Through such works (fictional or based on real events) literature probes law’s ability to speak justice, or betray it.
Literature is also a space for marginal voices. The cry of the condemned in Victor Hugo’s The Last Day of a Condemned Man challenges the very foundation of the right to punish. Prison narratives, such as Tahar Ben Jelloun’s This Blinding Absence of Light, denounce the cruelty of authoritarian regimes where law becomes an instrument of torture. Through these silenced voices, literature becomes a site of memory and defiance. It also resists legal mechanisms of censorship and enforced silence, especially in regimes where the law suppresses or prosecutes literary expression. Exiled, imprisoned, or censored writers testify to a constant tension between creation and legislation.
The boundary between legal and literary language becomes a fertile ground for analysis. While legal discourse strives for precision, codification, and impersonality, it is also performative and functionalized. In response, literature often adopts legal codes to subvert, critique, or reimagine them. Hence the importance of reading law as text, and literature as critical act. The question of alterity is also central to this dialogue. Literary texts make audible what law silences or distorts: female, Black, migrant, Indigenous, or dissident voices. Kamel Daoud’s The Meursault Investigation rewrites The Stranger from the point of view of the nameless Arab, challenging the colonial foundations of the narrative, and the legal system that legitimized it. Here, literature becomes both a rewriting of history and a reinvention of law.
This nexus of law, narrative, and responsibility also prompts ethical reflection. To write is to judge; to judge is to interpret. Writers and judges alike adopt positions of discernment, arbitration, and responsibility toward the world. Both construct narratives that shape representations, emotions, and norms. Hence the need to reflect on the symbolic authority each one mobilizes and the effects it produces.
Finally, legal fictions (whether utopian or dystopian) enable the imagining of other laws, other norms, other societies. In an era where legal foundations are regularly questioned in light of political, ecological, or technological crises, literature may serve as a laboratory for experimenting with justice, illegality, rule, and transgression, thus outlining the contours of a law yet to come.
Paper proposals may address (but are not limited to) the following themes:
- Literary representations of legal figures and justice
- Trials and theatricality: narrative and aesthetic forms of judicial conflict
- Literature from the margins: exclusion, dissent, and legal critique
- Legal and literary language: tensions, intersections, and subversions
- Alterity and normativity: gender, race, postcoloniality, minorities
- Ethics of writing and responsibility of judgment
- Literature, memory, and justice in the face of historical violence
- Censorship, repressive laws, and resistance through literature
- Legal fictions and the imaginary of utopia/dystopia
- Law as text: cross-readings and critical practices
We welcome interdisciplinary contributions combining literature with law, philosophy, sociology, history, or political science. Proposals may focus on classical or contemporary literary corpora, on legal texts read as narratives, or on concrete representations of justice in fiction.
Submission Guidelines:
Proposals—a summary of 300 to 500 words, a preliminary bibliography, and a brief biography—should be sent to the following address: cdrli.uh1@outlook.com
Each proposal must include the author’s full contact information (last name, first name, university affiliation, email address, and mobile phone number), five keywords, the selected thematic axis, and a short biographical note. Submissions should be in Word format and the file should be named after the author.
Important Dates:
· Deadline for submission of proposals: December 15, 2025
· Notification of accepted proposals: January 15, 2026
· Submission of extended abstracts: February 1 & 2, 2026
· Conference dates: February 11 & 12, 2026
Selected papers will be published in special issues of international peer-reviewed and
indexed journals.
The conference will be held in person at the Hassan I University, Settat (Morocco).
It will take place exclusively in person on February 11 & 12, 2026.
The presentations can be delivered in French, Arabic, or English.
Fatima Zahra El Jamri