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E-book Loving Justice : Legal Emotions in William Blackstone's England

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Penilaian

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In the best- selling Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765– 69), William Blackstone— most celebrated as a legal scholar, but also an occasional poet— famously took the “ungodly jumble” of English law and transformed it into an elegant, readable, and easily transportable four- volume summary. Soon after publication, it became an interna-tional monument not only to English law, but to English conceptions of justice, or to, as Blackstone put it, “the immutable laws of good and evil” (I:40).1 The Commentaries was celebrated in London, carried on horse-back throughout the American colonies, and relied upon across what was fast becoming the British Empire.2 The first text assigned in Amer-ica’s first law school at William & Mary, it has been reprinted over 200 times in the 250 years since its initial publication, spawning numerous additional abridgements and related works, but also eliciting comment in fiction and poetry, right up to the present day. In recent years, Black-stone’s work has newly interested the US Supreme Court, and has been cited in more than 8 percent of Supreme Court cases.3Legal historians tend to regard the Commentaries as the first successful modern application of Enlightenment reason to English legal history. But “reason” and “history” alone do not fully explain the crucial role Black-stone’s work played in disseminating conceptions of justice throughout the British Empire. While assuming the voice of reason and claiming historical accuracy as the source of his authority, all in the service of presenting a comprehensive yet easily assimilated guide to English law, Blackstone was also deeply invested in what he thought of as “the quali-ties of the heart” related to law and justice (I:34).4 In this he reflected his own time, but also prefigured the view that our conceptions of justice are felt conceptions, interconnected to our perceptions of the beautiful and the ugly: they are arrived at emotionally and aesthetically, as well as rationally. Blackstone— a poet who believed that “the only true and natural foundations of society are the wants and fears of individuals”—was ideally situated to condense English law into a form that evoked emotions crucial to promoting English ideas of justice (I:47). Making art of English law, he avoided the typically dry, encyclopedic overview of black letter law common in his time, and instead produced an elegantly written, emotionally saturated treatise that encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice. That feeling element in the Commen-taries is the key to what might be called its “binding” power, the force that attracted readers to the Commentaries and made it an icon for English justice.5 In enlisting an affective aesthetics to represent English law as just, Blackstone created a moving, evocative poetics of justice with con-tinuing influence across the Western world.It is hard to imagine the state of English law before the Commentar-ies or the magnitude of Blackstone’s task.6 In an early poem discussed at length later in this introduction, Blackstone lamented the unpleas-ant “noisiness” of Westminster Hall, a noisiness that was vastly overde-termined, standing in for the incoherence of the English way of doing law during this period. As the courts struggled to cope with interna-tional trade and its companions, paper credit and a burgeoning insur-ance industry, the noise of the present could be seen as frightening and threatening, capable of drowning out what must have seemed like the smoother, more harmonious rhythms of the past.

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Ketersediaan

Informasi Detail

Judul Seri

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No. Panggil

340 TEM l

Penerbit

2019 : New York University Press., New York

Deskripsi Fisik

276 hlm

Bahasa

English

ISBN/ISSN

9781479884452

Klasifikasi

340

Tipe Isi

text

Tipe Media

computer

Tipe Pembawa

online resource

Edisi

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Subjek

Law

Info Detail Spesifik

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Pernyataan Tanggungjawab

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Versi lain/terkait

Lampiran Berkas

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