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Shakespeare, Milton, Theology, and Inheritance

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 01:46 PM PDT

New in the Ashgate catalog: Joseph S. Jenkins, Inheritance Law and Political Theology in Shakespeare and Milton: Election and Grace as Constitutional in Early Modern Literature and Beyond (forthcoming February 2013).

From the catalog:

Reading God's will and a man's Last Will as ideas that reinforce one another, this study shows the relevance of England's early modern crisis, regarding faith in the will of God, to current debates by legal academics on the theory of property and its succession. The increasing power of the dead under law in the US, the UK, and beyond—a concern of recent volumes in law and social sciences—is here addressed through a distinctive approach based on law and humanities. Vividly treating literary and biblical battles of will, the book suggests approaches to legal constitution informed by these dramas and by English legal history.

This study investigates correlations between the will of God in Judeo-Christian traditions and the Last Wills of humans, especially dominant males, in cultures where these traditions have developed. It is interdisciplinary, in the sense that it engages with the limits of several fields: it is informed by humanities critical theory, especially Benjaminian historical materialism and Lacanian psychoanalysis, but refrains from detailed theoretical considerations. Dramatic narratives from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton are read as suggesting real possibilities for alternative inheritance (i.e., constitutional) regimes.
As Jenkins shows, these texts propose ways to alleviate violence, violence both personal and political, through attention to inheritance law.

Holmesian Constructions

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 08:52 AM PDT

Brad Snyder, University of Wisconsin Law School, has published The House that Built Holmes at 30 Law & History Review 661 (2012). Here is the abstract.

Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. became the first modern judge to attain iconic status. G. Edward White, the preeminent Holmes scholar of his generation, has argued that Holmes's canonization began with the "dramatic upsurge in the amount of commentary" in the late 1920s by reformers who appreciated his "modernist epistemology" and that Holmes and Brandeis achieved "the status of professional and cultural icons in the decade of the 1930s." This Article argues that Holmes's canonization began a decade earlier because of his association with a group of young progressives at the House of the Truth. During the 1910s, Felix Frankfurter, Walter Lippmann, and other progressives turned a Dupont Circle rowhouse into a salon, invited Washington establishment figures to frequent dinner and cocktail parties, and adopted Holmes as the House's hero. They canonized Holmes to attack the Court's anti-labor decisions. Holmes participated in his own canonization to further his ambitions of elite recognition. At age seventy, he was frustrated on the Court and considered retirement. He wrote for what Laurence Baum has described as a discrete judicial audience at the House of Truth. Holmes's canonization matters because it exemplifies canonization as political instrumentalism. The House wanted constitutional change; Holmes wanted recognition.
Download the article from SSRN at the link. 

Marcel Ayme and "Magical Legalism"

Posted: 21 Sep 2012 08:48 AM PDT

Jeffrey Miller, University of Western Ontario Faculty of Law, has published The Magical Legalism of Marcel Aymé: Charming Rogues and the Suspension of Physical, Natural, and Positive Law at 53 Les Cahiers de Droit 649 (2012). Here is the abstract.
Some of Marcel Aymé's most delightful work concerns charming rogues, protagonists who lack the heroism of moral outlaws such as Robin Hood or the golem of Jewish literature but act outside the rule of law in a way that is psychologically if not always morally coherent. On other "law and literature" occasions, Aymé employs what is sometimes called fantasy, but has the sardonic bite of magical realism – what this analysis considers "magical legalism," where individuals circumvent physical, natural, and positive law in attempts to achieve pure self-expression or egocentric notions of justice.
Download the essay from SSRN at the link. 
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