“Equity Stirring is a quirky and engaging book. Its quirkiness arises in part from the way it straddles two audiences and two disciplines: lawyers and literary scholars, law and literature.
The book contains a great wealth and variety of insight and scholarship...the sense of engagement comes from the book's steadfast and spirited defense of equity as a public virtue inside and outside the law.
...this is an important, compendious, and thought-provoking work that should be on the shelves of everyone interested in equity studies.” – Mark Fortier,
Law and Literature
“This beautiful book, deeply learned in the branch of jurisprudence we call equity and deeply engaged with the western literary tradition, gives new life to equity in the legal sense by connecting it with equity in the larger sense: as it is defined both in ordinary language and experience and by great writers, especially Dickens and Shakespeare. Equity Stirring transforms our sense of what equity is and can be and demonstrates in a new and graceful way the importance of connecting law with other arts of mind and language.” – James Boyd White, author of Living Speech: Resisting the Empire of Force,
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“Equity Stirring 'is a fine example of interdisciplinary legal scholarship at its best. Watt has managed to produce a book that is fresh and innovative, and thoroughly accessible. Deploying a range of familiar, and not so familiar, texts from across the humanities, Watt has presented a fascinating historical and literary commentary on the evolution of modern ideas of justice and equity.” – Ian Ward, Professor of Law at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne.,
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“This book is intended to reach the law and literature community and deserves the warm praise it has received for its 'deep learning' and 'fresh approach'.
Equity Stirring is fascinating as a twenty-first century lawyer's perspective on the application of Shakespeare, utilising the works to provides 'common ground' for exploring a radical legal thesis. Shakespeare is not deployed as a brand to assist with marketing, but is invoked as a means of shaping legal pedagogy and communicating new legal analysis within an engaging and familiar framework.
Valuable to anyone interested in the early modern period, the legal language of drama or Shakespeare's relationship with the law. Cover to cover reading will reward those concerned with the enduring themes of justice and mercy.” – John Curtis,
Cahiers Elisabethains