Bøger af Michael Demson

This volume examines the activity of seeking justice through literature during the "age of revolutions" (c. 1750-1850), marked by efforts to expand political and human rights and rethink attitudes towards poverty and criminality. While the chapters revolve around legal topics, they concentrate on literary engagements with the experience of the law, revealing how people perceive the fairness of a given legal order and work with and against regulations to adjust the rule of law to the demands of conscience. The volume updates analysis of this conflict between law and equity by drawing on the concept of "epistemic injustice" to describe the harm done to personal identity and collective flourishing by the uneven distribution of resources and the wish to punish breaches of order. It shows how writing and reading can foment inquiries into the meanings of 'justice' and 'equity' and aid efforts to humanize the rule of law.

Masks of Anarchy tells the extraordinary story of Percy Shelley's poem ';The Masque of Anarchy,' from its conception in Italy and suppression in England to the moment it became a catalyst for protest among New York City workers a century later. Shelley penned the poem in 1819, after hearing of the Peterloo Massacre, where British cavalry charged peaceful political demonstrators near Manchester. His words would later inspire figures as wide-ranging as Henry David Thoreau and Mahatma Gandhiand also Pauline Newman, the woman the New York Times called the ';New Joan of Arc' in 1907. Newman was a Jewish immigrantwho worked in the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, and came to be a leading organizerand the first female organizerof one of America's most powerful unions, the International Ladies' Garment Workers' Union. As she marched with tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of New Yorkers in the streets, Shelley's poem never ceased to inspire her. ';Shake your chains to earth like dew,' it implores. ';Ye are manythey are few.'