This handbook focuses on the relationship between law and tragedy. It shows how tragedy's capacity to stage complex, conflicting forces in human existence offers a rich source of insight into law and politics. Approaching tragedy not merely as a literary genre, but as a mode of understanding conflict, finitude, responsibility, judgment, and political order, the volume demonstrates how tragic thought can deepen our understanding of legal and political concepts, contemporary legal systems, and institutional structures. This book addresses various aspects of tragedy from tragic literature to tragic philosophy, from antiquity to the present, from phenomenology to theory on legal adjudication and democratic decision-making. Scholars of law, philosophy, theater, and literature alike will appreciate the book's conversational ability to explore the knowledge and sense of presence we gain through a cultivated understanding of the tragic.

Timo Slootweg is Associate Professor in the Department of Philosophy of Law at Leiden University, the Netherlands. He obtained his PhD in 2000 from the Faculty of Philosophy in Rotterdam, with a dissertation entitled History and Ethics: Historical Consciousness in the Tradition of Hegel, Heidegger, and Derrida. In Rotterdam, he taught philosophy of history for several years; since then, at Leiden, he has taught philosophy of law and ethics. His research focuses on the philosophy and theology of law, with particular reference to Christian existentialism, personalism, dialogical philosophy, phenomenology, and postmodernism. Among his favorite thinkers are Augustine, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Berdyaev, Shestov, Buber, Heidegger, and Levinas. Of his many publications, two monographs stand out. In 2016, he published, in Dutch, Uit de schaduw van de wet: Inleiding tot de esthetica van het recht (From Out of the Shadow of the Law: Introduction to the Aesthetics of Law). In 2023, he published, also in Dutch, Langs tragische einders: Verkenningen in de esthetica van moraal en recht, which has recently been translated and published in English as Tragedy in Ethics and Law: Other Voices of Dionysus (Springer, 2025).

Bart Jansen is Associate Professor of Legal Philosophy and is affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, Nyenrode Business University, Leiden University, Airlangga University in Surabaya, Indonesia, and Anton de Kom University in Paramaribo, Suriname. From 2023 to 2025, he was affiliated with the Department of Philosophy at New York University. His research primarily explores the intersections of law, philosophy, and aesthetics. He also investigates questions of political theology, language, semiotics, existentialism, postmodernism, and legal anthropology, especially in relation to Indigenous legal traditions and the rights of nature. In the fields of business ethics and corporate governance, his work examines the politicization and juridification of ethics. On these themes, he has published The Juridification of Business Ethics (Springer, 2023) and The Political Corporation: Carl Schmitt and Business Ethics (Springer, 2026).