[CILS] The Parable and Allegory – Manifesting the Humanities in Law through Theatrical Jurisprudence

[CILS] The Parable and Allegory – Manifesting the Humanities in Law through Theatrical Jurisprudence One of the challenges for law and jurisprudence of the humanities is that old quibble – what are they going to do for law, how are they going to produce any real effect on the underpinnings and practices in the field? In the face of the challenges of AI, and the loss of the basics of the reading of case law, the potential for the humanities to operate as a corrective for the absence of law’s undergirdings is an attractive possibility. The question then is – how can the humanities manifest into law?This is something that might seem an odd question. However, as I have found over many years, the insights of the humanities do not always find their way into law. More often than not, law responds by saying that they are not law or jurisprudence. Yet we have a long history of accepting stories – parables and allegories of a different kind – Lord Atkin’s neighbour principle drawn from the parable of the Good Samaritan, or Lon Fuller’s Speluncean explorers and King Rex – as a Coverian bridge between the moral world beyond law. In this talk, I turn to the potential of theatrical jurisprudence to find a way to create bridges to connect the humanities in all their possibilities to law.Marett Leiboff is Honorary Professorial Fellow in the School of Law, University of Wollongong Australia. She is a Law and Humanities scholar who developed the field of Theatrical Jurisprudence. A late onset lawyer, she brought her multidisciplinary background into her thinking as a lawyer and jurisprudent, drawing on theatre studies, broadcasting regulation and art history. Her PhD, which explored the problematic decision making of the courts in Australian cultural heritage law, laid the path for all her later scholarship, and her appointment as a member of Australia’s National Cultural Heritage Committee. She initially researched into media and broadcasting law, but later moved exclusively into jurisprudential scholarship. Now retired, Marett remains an active scholar, and was appointed an inaugural Honorary Member of the Law Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia. Date/Time: 14/09/2026 16:00-17:00 Venue: Room 901, 9/F Cheng Yu Tung Tower, The University of Hong Kong Organized by: Faculty of Law

Uploaded at 2026/08/09