In a recent article in the Journal of American History, Daniel Rodgers attempts to sketch out the "career" of republicanism as an organizing historiographical concept. Rodgers is principally interested in establishing republicanist historiography as a "paradigm," a status comparable to that conventionally assigned to two other significant twentieth-century historiographical...
David A. Bell, Lawyers and Citizens: The Making of a Political Elite in Old Regime France. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994. Pp., 280. $35.00. It seems clear enough that there is some link between the legal profession and the making of revolutions in the Western world. It is clear, at the very least, if we consider the Big Three liberal revolutions of the early high era of...
William Gaddis, A Frolic of His Own. New York: Poseidon Press, 1994. Pp. 586. $25.00 A Frolic of His Own is not merely the finest novel ever written about the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure .... In an era when students who have not paid the dues of reading Eliot, Yeats, or even Wordsworth claim the privilege of postmodernist critique, William Gaddis's Frolic may prove...
Jonathan P. Ribner, Broken Tablets: The Cult of the Law in French Art from David to Delacroix. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993. Pp. xxiii, 222. $50.00. According to a contemporary account describing the festival of Simonneau, which took place in Paris in June of 1790, the "most curious item in the procession as a whole was a kind of shark raised...
Last year thirty-one people were executed in the United States. One was gassed, six were electrocuted, one was hanged; the rest were put to death by lethal injection. While all other constitutional democracies have abandoned capital punishment, the United States tenaciously clings to it. We use the death penalty as retribution, but also, as Michel Foucault reminds us, to respond...
In Louis Begley's remarkable work of Holocaust fiction, Wartime Lies, the narrator muses, "The issue was the limit of one's inventiveness and memory." The "issue" refers to the narrator's struggles, within the context of the novel, to conceal his Jewish identity, yet the "limit" of which he speaks can be understood as standing for the pervasive problem of representing the...
In his book, Sex and Reason, Judge Richard Posner argues that law and society should treat sexuality as a "morally indifferent subject." Society should regard sexual preferences as having no greater moral significance than preferences for food. Although many gay rights proponents disagree with Posner's specific application of this principle, no one seems to disagree with his...
Competing historical and cultural understandings of the human body make clear that medicine and the law construe bodily truths from differing knowledge bases. Jurists rely virtually entirely on medical testimony to analyze biological data, and medical professionals are not usually conversant with the legal ramifications of their diagnoses. In early modern Europe, both physicians...
Both lauded within its own West Hollywood industry and seized during a St. Valentine's Day police raid on the Bijou Theatre in Chicago, the recent gay porn videotape More of a Manopens, as these things go, with its leading man Vito down on his knees.
In this issue, the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities features many of the papers given at our April 1994 symposium, The Sacred Body in Law and Literature. The symposium drew together literary, theological, and legal scholars to examine, from a variety of perspectives, the intersection between "sacred
Between July 1874 and July 1875, the most important subject of discussion in America was New York author and editor Theodore Tilton's charge that Henry Ward Beecher had committed adultery with Tilton's wife, Elizabeth. Beecher, the nation's foremost preacher, was a national symbol of morality, idealism, and self-realization. His Sunday sermons attracted thousands weekly and were...
Daniel J. Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers? Shakespeare's Legal Appeal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xvii, 274. $24.95. Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xi, 264. $49.95. The law and literature project continues to expand in two directions. First, some scholars pursue the...
It is rather difficult for me to respond to a rage so fierce that at times it seems to lapse into incoherence, but I shall try. What I have done to bring forth such a rage seems to be two things. First is my celebration of the quotidian in the lives of intellectuals ... most significantly for Mr. Shannon, though by no means my exclusive focus, their just getting on in a...
John Henry Schlegel, American Legal Realism and Empirical Social Science. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 418. $55.00 John Henry Schlegel has written a book that attempts to explain why law has not followed the path of other academic disciplines in adopting a natural-science model of empirical inquiry. He convincingly argues that by the time legal...
The editors of the Journal invited me to review James Boyd White's Acts of Hope. In response I proposed inviting Professor White to join me in a conversation about his work. First the editors and then he accepted the proposal. Professor White and I agreed that we might call a halt to this experiment at any time because we would not subvert our friendship in the attempt to enact...
Richard E Hamm, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment: Temperance Reform, Legal Culture, and the Polity, 1880-1920. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995. Pp. x, 341. $49.95. Richard Hamm's book, Shaping the Eighteenth Amendment, is a welcome addition to the literature on prohibition and the history of drinking in America. The author's most important contribution is to...
In Sources of the Self, Charles Taylor explores the stories about "identity
This Article traces and critiques the early formalization of the Euro-American sex/gender system) It seeks to illuminate the evolution of historical biases in American law and society that continue to dominate and destabilize sex/gender relations. As such, this Article is a prequel-it provides the origins of a story already partially told elsewhere. The earlier account...
This Symposium inhabits two intersections: the intersection linking sexual orientation with other axes of social stratification, and the intersection linking the legal future to the legal past, legal reform to legal history. Francisco Valdes examines the relationship between sex and gender in Euro-American cultural and legal history to support a reform proposal on behalf of...
The reconciliation of faith and reason was the dominant concern of John Henry Cardinal Newman's intellectual life. His fifteen "University Sermons" show him wrestling with the subject throughout his twenty years as an Anglican cleric. In An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, written after his conversion to Roman Catholicism, Newman forged his thought on the subject into a more...
Professor Greenawalt's perceptive Essay raises at least four issues: the issue of what he calls modernization, the issue of standards of interpretation, the distinction between discourse within the law and public debate over social values, and the question of the compatibility of hermeneutics and natural law. I would like to look briefly at each of these issues in turn.
Harlon L. Dalton, Racial Healing: Confronting the Fear Between Blacks and Whites. New York: Doubleday, 1995. Pp. 246. $22.50. Much of contemporary legal scholarship expresses a narrative impulse. Eschewing the traditional norms and forms of legal scholarship, many professors have turned to storytelling to capture issues not easily elucidated through more conventional approaches...
Another article on The Merchant of Venice? Richard Weisberg has thought the play capable of sustaining even such hyperbole as this: "Perhaps no text except the Bible and the United States Constitution has so implicated audiences in fierce struggles for dominance and control." Within the legal commentary alone, an entire law-and-literature symposium has been devoted to the play...
Recent discussions of the relations between law and literature have tended to focus on prose - novels, short stories, autobiographies, even plays - rather than on lyric poetry. Literature has been seen as a locus of plots and situations that parallel legal cases or problems, either to shed light on complexities not always acknowledged by the ordinary practice of legal discourse...