Harlot’s Fate

2020 ◽  
pp. 147-164
Author(s):  
Julie Miller
Keyword(s):  
Law And Literature ◽  
Lydia Maria Child ◽  
Unwritten Law

This chapter reviews the later years and final fates of many of the players in Amelia Norman's story, such as Mike Walsh, the Democratic politician and journalist who had championed Amelia. It mentions Amelia's celebrated jail mate, George Wilkes, who capitalized on his experience in the Tombs and produced his prison memoir, Mysteries of the Tombs. It also traces Frederick Tallmadge's reputation after he became the principal judge of the Court of Sessions and struggled in vain to persuade the jurors to ignore the context of Amelia's crime. The chapter points out how Amelia's story is still remembered in studies of abortion, prostitution, seduction in law and literature, the “unwritten law,” female murderers, and in studies and biographies of Lydia Maria Child. It includes Lydia's letter to a friend, indicating Amelia had come to a bad end.

The Poetry of Justice: Hesiod and the Origins of Greek Law

Ramus ◽  
1992 ◽  
Vol 21 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-78 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Gagarin
Keyword(s):  
Law And Literature ◽  
First Century ◽  
Legal Scholarship ◽  
Prose Style ◽  
Legal Writing ◽  
Prose Literature ◽  
The Many ◽  
Specific Concern

A growing area of contemporary legal scholarship is the field loosely described by the expression ‘law and literature’. One of the many points of intersection between law and literature is the study of legal writing, including the opinions of judges and jurists, as a form of literature. Scholars began to study the works of the Attic orators as literature as early as the first century BC, but their specific concern was with these texts as examples of Attic prose and their literary interest primarily concerned matters of rhetoric and prose style. Similarly, modern scholars who have continued this study of the orators have generally examined legal orations not as a separate genre but as another example of prose literature in the same category with history or epideictic oratory. But forensic oratory can also be studied as a form of literature sui generis, whose worth is determined by the special requirements of this genre. As background for such a study I propose to examine the earliest examples of legal oratory, as seen in the works of Homer and Hesiod.

Ambivalent Affines: Law Like Literature

2020 ◽  
pp. 174387212097199
Author(s):  
Kathleen Birrell
Keyword(s):  
Law And Literature ◽  
Methodological Challenge ◽  
Reading To Read ◽  
The Law ◽  
Short Essay ◽  
Oscillatory Rhythm ◽  
Intellectual Legacy

This short essay will dwell upon the ‘law of literature and the literature of law’, as illuminated in the enduring scholarship and intellectual legacy of Peter Fitzpatrick. Reading with Fitzpatrick, we must grapple with a law that is both constituted and subverted by recourse to the supplement of fiction. These ambivalent ‘affines’, law and literature, share in an oscillatory rhythm: each is constituted and enlivened by an unbounded exteriority, yet each must be rendered normatively determinate. I reflect upon the ways in which Fitzpatrick’s account of ‘law like literature’ grasps and hones the methodological challenge implicit in this reading: to read law as literature and literature as law. Yet further, I extend a reading of Fitzpatrick’s scholarship that acknowledges this fictive law as not merely susceptible to but constituted by decoloniality.

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