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Selected Works

Penelope J Pether

2009

Discursive construction of national identity

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Full-Text Articles in Law

Comparative Constitutional Epics, Penelope Pether Dec 2008

Comparative Constitutional Epics, Penelope Pether

Penelope J Pether

This essay takes up Robert Cover's account, in Nomos and Narrative of Constitutional Epics. Ranging across legal and literary texts including Toni Morrison's Beloved, David Malouf's An Imaginary Life, the Canadian Arar Commission Report, and Bringing Them Home, the Report of the Australian Human Rights and Opportunity Commission's National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families, it concludes that what comparative study of Constitutions and their Epics might yield are brutal truths and the judgements of history, but also insights into how we might make of that unpromising material a nomos and a …