Law & Humanities Blog |
| Posted: 14 Mar 2011 12:51 PM PDT I'm just back from the ALSCH (Association for the Study of Law, Society and Culture) Conference, this year hosted by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Law School, and I had a wonderful time, as did, I think, the other attendees. Dean John White and his faculty, staff, and students were charming and attentive to us all. The law librarians and staff in particular put up a great display featuring books written or edited by people presenting at the conference and the UNLV IT folks were in attendance to trouble shoot. The panels were excellent. There were so many that I had trouble choosing among them, but those that I attended were one on the rhetoric of net neutrality that was really innovative, and another on gender and violence in popular music that got me thinking about the relationships between rhetoric and economics. The officers--outgoing president Linda Meyer, secretary Serena Mayeri, treasurer Susan Ayres, webmaster Tucker Culbertson, and listserv moderator Susan Heinzelman--once again put on a great event. |
Next year Texas Wesleyan Law School will host, from March 15 to March 17, and then--save your pennies--it's off to Birkbeck College for the 2013 get-together.
Wife-Selling In "The Mayor of Casterbridge"
Posted: 14 Mar 2011 12:36 PM PDT
Julie C. Suk, Cardozo School of Law, has published The Moral and Legal Consequences of Wife-Selling in The Mayor of Casterbridge in Gender, Law and the British Novel (Alison LaCroix and Martha Nussbaum eds.; Oxford University Press eds.; 2011). Here is the abstract.
What kind of man sells his wife? Thomas Hardy's The Mayor of Casterbridge opens with a famous episode in which a poor hay trusser, Michael Henchard, sells his wife, Susan, by impulsively putting her up for auction in a public market. Susan is purchased by a sailor, with whom she departs and subsequently lives as husband and wife. Subtitled "The Life and Death of a Man of Character," the novel presents itself as a study of the flawed, complex, and ultimately tragic moral character of the man who sold his wife. This essay interprets the novel's account of the moral consequences of the wife-sale in The Mayor of Casterbridge, by examining the shifting legal and social meanings of the practice in nineteenth century Britain. The novel exploits uncertainty about the legal consequences of wife-selling to generate the novel's moral tragedy.Download the essay from SSRN at the link.
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