Philosophy's relation to the world of lived experience (the life-world) is complex and controverted. In traditional vocabulary, the issue is whether philosophy's habitat resides inside or outside the Platonic cave. The issue has not come to rest in our time. While "analytic" philosophers prefer to externalize or distance their targets of analysis, Continental thinkers (at least...
In the spring of 1802, the painter Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy de Trioson first exhibited his Ossian and His Warriors Receiving the Dead Heroes of the French Army to a French audience. While the work was of interest to the French for its allegorical content and its mix of classical and romantic styles, its provocative subject would have been most compelling to the English. The...
It may be useful to identify the many matters about which, I believe, Martha Fineman and I agree in order to delineate more precisely our areas of disagreement. Fineman, for example, does not appear to question my historical periodization. She seems to accept my findings that the 1920s and 1930s were decades of legal enforcement of conventional morality; that the 1940s, 1950s...
This article will examine some remarkable cyclical movements in the law dealing with rape, prostitution, pornography, homosexuality, and gender-related violence in New York State from 1920 to 1980. By focusing on this single state, which for most of the period under study was the most populous state and the economic and cultural leader of the nation, the historian can examine...
Richard A. Posner. Sex and Reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Pp. vii, 458. $29.95. With his special gift for contrariety, Judge Richard Posner places his ambitious investigation of the vicissitudes of sex under the aegis of a quote from Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics: "Pleasures are an impediment to rational deliberation, and the more so the more pleasurable they...
Chris Goodrich, Anarchy and Elegance: Confessions of a Journalist at Yale Law School. Boston: Little, Brown, 1991. Pp. 285. $19.95. Richard D. Kahlenberg, Broken Contract: A Memoir of Harvard Law School. New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. Pp. xiv, 238. $22.95. In his famous parable, "Before the Law," Franz Kafka describes a man from the country who innocently seeks "admittance to the...
In the mid-1970s, Judith Shklar began teaching an undergraduate course entitled "American Political Thought" at Harvard. I was the second "grader" she chose for it. (The first was William Kristol, later Vice President Dan Quayle's Chief of Staff.) Shklar's interest in teaching the subject surprised many, including me. She had been raised, after all, largely in the Baltics and...
Legal records have preserved the names and statements of women who were recusants, Catholics and other nonconformists who did not attend Book of Common Prayer services as statutes required in Tudor and Stuart England. In these records, the recusants
Most discussions about notions of authority and dissent in early modem Europe usually imply those embedded in Christian traditions, whether Protestant or Catholic. To address these same issues from the perspective of Jewish culture in early modem Europe is to consider the subject from a relatively different vantage point. The small Jewish communities of the fifteenth through...
What I am presenting here is part of a book-length project on the politics of maternal sovereignty in early modern France. The focus is on the staging of feminine voices in The Heptameron and their delineation of a political conflict between maternal authority on the one hand and daughterly resistance on the other, in an attempt to understand something about how the nation-state...
My goal in this essay is to introduce legal academics to a body of theory on sex equality generated throughout Western Europe from at least the fourteenth century until the French Revolution. The authors in this tradition were mostly what we today might call "sameness
The following essays were originally presented as part of Justice and Its Discontents: Dissent in the Renaissance, a symposium held at Yale University's Whitney Humanities Center on February 21, 1992. The symposium was sponsored by the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, the Whitney Humanities Center, the Yale Law School, and the Smart Family Foundation.
Although few would dispute that law and philosophy developed from the same tradition or even that law uses philosophical concepts, a premise of much legal scholarship is that law has developed its own methodology and is wholly separate from philosophy. This attitude may reflect, in part, a feeling that philosophy is more esoteric or difficult than law, and that lawyers are ill...
A mid-eighteenth-century traveller noted with surprise that parents in London regularly took their children to watch hangings. Upon returning home, the children would be whipped so that they would remember the spectacle. Yet by the 1780s, such literal dependence upon the visual as part of punishment was in retreat. Increasingly, the criminal justice system relied on what remained...
William Ian Miller, Humiliation: And Other Essays on Honor, Social Discomfort, and Violence. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 270. $25.00. Recently, I was given a curious gift: a compact disc, entitled Golden Throats: The Great Celebrity Sing-Off, that contains a compilation of bad cover versions of famous rock and pop songs. These are not ordinary bad cover...
Many recent debates about interpretation of the law, familiar to students of legal theory, are determined by a rather simple question - the one I take as my title here - which has, surprisingly, received little explicit attention. These debates are vexed and complex, and have been exacerbated by the personalities of some participants and the professional jealousy aroused by real...
In January 1992, People magazine ran a story entitled "Die, My Daughter, Die!"
More than forty years ago, Maurice Merleau-Ponty identified a philosophical fault line that continues to rumble through diverse contemporary debates. "Today," he proclaimed, "a humanism does not oppose religion with an explanation of the world. It begins by becoming aware of contingency. In the current period of deconstruction and other postmodernisms, Merleau-Ponty's rejection...
Katherine Fischer Taylor, In the Theater of Criminal Justice: The Palais de Justice in Second Empire Paris. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xxii, 161. $35.00. "A drawing-room in Second Empire style. A massive bronze ornament stands on the mantelpiece.
I take it that one of the urgent questions for the university in the 1990s is: When does the insistence on ethnicity become productive, and when counterproductive? The question, you may think, is an impossible one, because it would be answered differently, even divisively, depending on whether one belongs to a community still seeking to present its ethnic credentials or to an...
To a Western European scholar like myself, the debate on the meaning and the institutionalization of multicultural education that has taken place in the United States, especially during the past decade, is so heated and controversial that I have decided to approach it indirectly, that is, by analyzing the role played by issues of race and gender in a different context-the Italian...
In 1988, the University of Bologna celebrated its ninth centennial. The event was of such importance that the celebrations began in the fall of 1987 and ended happily in the springtime of 1989; otherwise, they could have continued uninterrupted until the dawn of the tenth centennial, like those trees decorated with bulbs for Christmas 1992 that are still lit up in many areas of...
To inaugurate the signing of an agreement for cultural exchange between the Università degli Studi di Bologna and Yale University, representatives from the two universities celebrated in the most academic of manners: with a symposium. Entitled "Interpretation in the University/Interpretation of the University," the symposium both furthered scholars