I am taking a little break from reading the final quizes from my summer school students -- a class of college juniors who're thinking about law school. Had a great time teaching them; we spent some time talking about race and nuisance cases taken from Integrating Spaces -- some jazz nuisance and a case that shut down the House of Prayer in Columbia, South Carolina. Really interesting cases, in large part because of what they say about the role that race plays in property law. We also read Boomer and Spur and a couple of other cases. One of the final questions was about an African American neighborhood in South Camden, New Jersey, where a developer built a cement grinding plant. Good stuff for introduction to property.
But as I sit here thumbing through the ABA Journal's recommended readings from thirty laywers, I was pleasantly surprised -- shocked (in a good way!) might be the right word -- to see that Judith Resnik recommends Robert Cover's Justice Accused. That is, I think, my single most favorite work of legal history. There's a lot of competition for that, but what I particularly like about Cover is how he integrates the moral issue of abolition with judges' fidelity to law. Judges faced tough choices and I really like how Cover details the landscape within which they could (or could not) move. I am pleased that he's getting such prominent attention in the ABA Journal.
I have taught Justice Accused a number of times and each time I have gone back to it I have seen more. It's astonishing to me how thorough (mature might be the word I'd use) a work of history Cover wrote just a few years out of school. I first read it in the fall of 1988 when I was in Eben Moglen's legal history class and at the time I found it too concerned with contemporary jurisprudence -- and thus something I did not enjoy as much as some of the other books we read. It's a sign of my own evoluation as a legal historian that one of the things that I now like about the book is how it used the lens of the pre-Civil War period to view contemporary issues in the conflict between law and justice. And, of course, I love his turn to literature -- Antigone and Billy Budd. And I might add that one of my favorite works of literature is a book that Cover might have used but did not: Harriet Beecher Stowe's obscure 1856 novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp. Stowe saw little hope for judges to act on their feelings of humanity, though she thought that they should. Thus, she laid out the boundaries of what we might expect from judges -- and offered an alternative jurisprudence based on sentiment. Dred is not the wonderful work of literature that Billy Budd is -- that probably would have been my recommendation for a book every lawyer should read -- but it is a powerful and important statement about the contraints that law imposes on judges, in the pre-Civil War period and today as well.
All of this reminds me that the summer's drawing to a conclusion and I have yet to talk about Resnik and Dennis Curtis' beautiful volume, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms. It seems like just a couple weeks ago I was listening to some very, very smart commentary on it at Law and Society -- and now as I'm hitting the panic button given how much work remains to be done this summer -- I fear that post will have to be put off for a while more. My interest in the volume is how they link statistics on litigation with the physical environment of courthouses and western art. Two things that do not immediately seem like they would go together, but do!
Thanks for these comments. I've added two books to my reading list!
I made a list on WorldCat to make it easy for people to find the recommended books in libraries: http://uwlaw.worldcat.org/profiles/UWlawref/lists/2757621. I linked to your post from the note for Justice Accused. Strong endorsement!
Posted by: Mary Whisner | July 31, 2011 at 03:18 PM
Thanks so much for doing this, Mary. I think the period at the end of your link got picked up by typepad by mistake -- the link to your page is
http://uwlaw.worldcat.org/profiles/UWlawref/lists/2757621
Posted by: Alfred Brophy | July 31, 2011 at 03:29 PM