Coda
This brief coda takes up the value of sympathy in the context of resistance. Inspired by Mary Wollstonecraft's agitated reaction to Blackstone, the coda rereads agitation as a trigger for sympathetic review in light of a recent Texas case in which an agitated defendant undermined the court's “decorum.” Wollstonecraft was quieted by an early death and the cultural suppression of her work; the Texas defendant discussed in this coda was silenced by the administration of seizure-inducing electric shocks amounting to torture. Both Wollstonecraft and the Texas defendant, the hapless Terry Lee Morris, offered threats to form, to the formal trappings of justice, to its harmonic balance, or to what is termed “decorum” in the Texas case. Thus, their agitation can be reinterpreted in light of recent work on “excessive subjectivity.” Read at a slant, decorum seems just another name for harmonic justice, agitation another word for resistance.