For the past five or six years I have included six poems by Wallace Stevens in the readings for a required first-year law course. They are the only poems I teach in the course. Thomas Grey's thoughtful essay raises a seemingly unlikely question. Should Stevens's poetry be considered part of the legal canon? Do his poems possess legal authority? That in answer some kind of a "yes...
Reality is a cliche from which we escape by metaphor. -Stevens, "Adagia" Trace the gold sun about the whitened skyWithout evasion by a single metaphor.Look at it in its essential barrennessAnd say this, this is the centre that I seek. -Stevens, "Credences of Summer" A few years ago I was in charge of deciding when students could receive credit at my law school for "law-related...
I wrote this paper in response to a hundred-odd manuscript pages of Bruce Ackerman's forthcoming book Discovering the Constitution. Fleshing it out, I have come to sense that the paper shares some of the occupational weaknesses of the new and somewhat beleaguered discipline of a transnational study of culture, especially if that study steps back from what is perceived as...
Elaine Scarry, in the paper prepared for this Conference, presented a most interesting argument concerning the control of nuclear arms in relation to the social contract, and the way in which a notion of "distribution" of the authorization over our nation's arms belongs to the Second Amendment. I won't in this comment address directly the crucial constitutional and moral issues...
This essay extends the remarks I made at the symposium, "Language, Law, and Compulsion," but it tries to retain the style and spirit of my oral delivery. Indeed I must retain that spirit if I am to practice what I preach. This essay suggests that the rhetoric of formal academic discourse and our experience of formal academic argument differ vastly from the rhetorics and...
In this issue we feature edited versions of many of the papers given at the symposium the journal sponsored in February, 1989, entitled "Language, Law, and Compulsion.
Many of our modern views about property, and indeed about political and economic matters generally, come from the works of seventeenth and eighteenth century theorists who hoped to find a firmly scientific basis for the study of "political economy." Their systematic approach suggests that these theorists
Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State. Harvard University Press. 330 pp. $25.00. In the spring of 1989 Yale Law School students published the first issue of the Yale Journal of Law and Feminism. The cover featured a boldly revised drawing of Justitia, traditional symbol of justice. Still garbed in a simple robe and holding aloft the scales of justice, the...
Mark Kelman, A Guide to Critical Legal Studies, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1987. Pp. ix, 360. $14.95. As an act of simple justice to Professor Mark Kelman and his A Guide to Critical Legal Studies, I must begin with a caveat. Every author has the right to expect a reviewer to criticize the book he has written, not the one he might have written. I have tried to meet...
"We were different/We knew we were different/We were told we were different," stated Chief Flying Eagle of the Mashpee Wampanoag Indians in the course of a trial over their tribal status. The plaintiffs, the Mashpee Indians, asked for a determination that the residents of "Cape Cod's Indian Town" were direct descendants of Native Americans known as the Mashpee, had lived...
Ralph Ellison almost always has something useful to say. In "The World and the Jug," his celebrated rebuke of Irving Howe, Ellison offers an eloquent and passionate discussion of the moment in cultural politics when social criticism enacts a relationship between representation as depiction and representation as delegation. For Ellison, Howe's "Black Boys and Native Sons...
The "problem" of judicial discretion in our federal courts is perennial and vexing. Appointed by the President and tenured for life, federal judges are an anomaly in a democratic system such as ours. Their license to choose among rules of law and select precedents for their holdings may be restrained by craft rules, the opinion of peers, and the constraints of the Federal Rules...
In De Legibus, Marcus, as the principal speaker and stand-in for Cicero, describes law as right reason, as the selection of justice within a community. Most modem readers have concluded that this description is based on the belief that there is an immutable human nature and a transcendent order in the universe that dictates right reason and thus determines specific rules of law...
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1991. Pp. xxii, 438. $34.95 (cloth), $19.95 (paper). Pereat mundus, fiat philosophia, fiat philosophus, fiam! Fredric Jameson has long been among our most sophisticated and influential cultural critics. Combining Marxism and structuralism, Jameson's persistent effort has been...
We live at a time of renewed historical consciousness-in part due to the events in the former "East,
Notice the plural form: it is not only that the bible contains many laws, but also and more importantly that it contains three different legal codes. The many laws are easy to understand, and it is equally easy to understand the popular wish that the yoke of the covenant be less onerous. An old folktale claims that on the day after the Sinai revelation, the Israelites rose early...
Nobody can agree on what the Constitution means. Some argue that it prohibits states from banning abortions, while others claim that it says nothing about abortion, or that it prohibits abortion. It is claimed that the Constitution abolishes the death penalty, and that it specifically authorizes the death penalty; that it bans segregated schools and is indifferent to segregation...
The contemporary Law and Literature movement has revolved around a central question, the question of interpretation, offered not only as its analytic focus but also as its conjectural problematic: as a well-defined point of convergence between the two disciplines. In this essay I want to explore a different point of convergence, somewhat less well-defined, marked not by the...
The spring squall of 1991 about political correctness on campus has passed, leaving behind a muddy residue in the nation's political rhetoric. Although the squall initially may have seemed to develop from a detached interest in campus developments, it rapidly became clear that the campaign against "political correctness" was this year's version of conservative concern about...
In two fascinating and provocative papers, Judith Jarvis Thomson discusses the "Trolley Problem.
At the top of Prospect Hill in Harvard, Massachusetts, are the Fruitlands Museums, founded in 1914 by Clara Endicott Sears, a wealthy Bostonian who summered in Harvard. She befriended the last members of the Shaker communities of Harvard and Shirley that formed the Harvard Bishopric of the United Believers of Christ, and chronicled their histories. Miss Sears structured the...
In Thomas Heywood's Apology for Actors (1612), which contributes to the lively debate over the theater in Renaissance England, two murderous wives make cameo appearances. Against claims that the theater displays and corrupts women, Heywood argues that the theater is instead an arena in which criminal women can be found out and controlled. For Heywood, to imagine women as...
Kent Greenawalt, Law and Objectivity. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. x, 288. $45.00. Is law objective? The question is oddly unsatisfactory-Objective in what sense? Objective compared with what?-and one is naturally curious to know why it is being asked. The best way to approach Kent Greenawalt's latest book is to begin with the accusations made against traditional...
Bruce Ackerman, We the People: Foundations. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991. Pp. x, 369. $24.95 (cloth), $9.95 (paper). With this book, the first in a projected series of at least three volumes, Bruce Ackerman confirms what attentive readers of his law review articles of the past ten years have already known-he is the most original and important writer on constitutional...