Portia's View of Justice in "The Merchant of Venice"

Roberta Linciano, University of Salento, has published "'Is that the law?': Portia's Mockery of Justice in The Merchant of Venice," in the Italian Society for Law and Literature (January 2010). Here is the abstract.

In this paper I examine the role performed by the disguised lawyer Portia during the trial Shylock vs. Antonio in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. With reference to the social, political and economic background of the Elizabethan age, I will explore Portia’s conception of justice, trying to assess if she acts as a loyal and equitable judge or as a vile impostor and investigating to what extent her conduct can be regarded as a model by modern lawyers or as a mere play upon the words.

While the paper should be available for download via SSRN, I could not get the download to work.

Shakespeare and Imperfect Justice

Roberta Linciano, University of Salento, has published Musing Upon the Imperfect Justice of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Here is the abstract.

Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure can be read as an inquiry into the themes of government and judgement. How do we make people obey the law? By exercising freedom or restraint? Should justice be administered with mercy or with equity? Who is the honest judge? The one who considers every situation impartially or the one who punishes in accordance with the circumstances of the case? Shakespeare shows how all the drama’s principal characters – Duke Vincentio, Angelo and Isabella – deal with such issues by delegating the role of decision-making to a third entity represented by the Deputy, the Rule and the Word, respectively. If, on the one hand, the act of attributing the burden of their personal responsibility to someone else irremediably compromises their proclaimed perfection, on the other, it triggers a process of self/other knowledge which will gradually lead them to recognize and accept the paradoxical nature of human law as well as their flaws.

What I will point out through the analysis of the final trial scene is the Bard’s belief that human justice will always live the irresolvable tension between the respect for general principles and the sensitivity towards the individual’s unique narrative. Vincentio’s unexpected and disappointing verdict is far from being a gratuitous act of forgiveness. It is an attempt to confront the “war ’twixt will and will not” (2.2.33) which is every judge’s and every man’s major challenge.

Sonnets and Statutes

Jeffrey G. Sherman, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago-Kent School of Law, has published Scorn Not the Sonnet: In Search of Shakespeare's Law. Here is the abstract.

Legal scholars love to use Shakespeare’s works as stimuli and even models for legal analysis. We write about King Lear or Measure for Measure or The Merchant of Venice but rarely about the Sonnets. Why is that? Perhaps we find the poems too obscure. Or too insipid. (One of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets – the “Fortune and men’s eyes” one – seems at first glance to say nothing more than “When I’m feeling depressed, I think about you, and that cheers me up.”) In this article, I examine three of Shakespeare’s sonnets and illustrate how a legal scholar or law professor might use these poems as scholarly or pedagogical vehicles. These illustrations will not discuss legal issues to a point of conclusion but will simply present some legal issues as analytic opportunities offered by a close reading of the Sonnets.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Portia's Conception of Justice

Roberta Linciano, University of Salento, has published 'Is that the Law?': Portia's Mockery of Justice in The Merchant of Venice as an Italian Society for Law and Literature (ISLL) Paper Essay. Here is the abstract.

In this paper I examine the role performed by the disguised lawyer Portia during the trial Shylock vs. Antonio in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. With reference to the social, political and economic background of the Elizabethan age, I will explore Portia’s conception of justice, trying to assess if she acts as a loyal and equitable judge or as a vile impostor and investigating to what extent her conduct can be regarded as a model by modern lawyers or as a mere play upon the words.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link. (NB: The essay is in Italian).

Law in Shakespeare's Sonnets

Jeffrey G. Sherman, IIT-Chicago-Kent College of Law, has published Scorn Not the Sonnet: In Search of Shakespeare's Law. Here is the abstract.

Legal scholars love to use Shakespeare’s works as stimuli and even models for legal analysis. We write about King Lear or Measure for Measure or The Merchant of Venice but rarely about the Sonnets. Why is that? Perhaps we find the poems too obscure. Or too insipid. (One of Shakespeare’s most famous sonnets – the “Fortune and men’s eyes” one – seems at first glance to say nothing more than “When I’m feeling depressed, I think about you, and that cheers me up.”) In this article, I examine three of Shakespeare’s sonnets and illustrate how a legal scholar or law professor might use these poems as scholarly or pedagogical vehicles. These illustrations will not discuss legal issues to a point of conclusion but will simply present some legal issues as analytic opportunities offered by a close reading of the Sonnets.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Who Wrote Shakespeare?

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, discussion of a new book on William Shakespeare that takes up the "who wrote Shakespeare" debate. The book: Contested Will. The author: James Shapiro.

Play Verified As Shakespeare's (And Fletcher's)

According to experts, that "literary hoax" that Alexander Pope made fun of in The Dunciad is a hoax no more. It really is by Shakespeare--well, partly by the Bard, and partly by John Fletcher, who was no slouch himself when it came to writing works for the stage. Double Falsehood, in which Shakespeare actually meets Miguel de Cervantes, the man who shares his death year (1616) and possibly his death date (April 23), depending on how one calculates it, turns out to be a play in which the Bard of Avon had a hand. The Royal Shakespeare Company will perform it in 2011, the first time in four hundred years that audiences have been able to enjoy it.

Shakespeare and Moot Court

Desmond Manderson, McGill University Faculty of Law, and Paul Yachnin have published "Shakespeare and Judgment: The Renewal of Law and Literature." It will appear as "Shakespeare Rules: Remembrance of Things Past" in volume 15 of The European Legacy (2010).
Here is the abstract.

Legal theorist Desmond Manderson and Shakespearean Paul Yachnin develop parallel arguments that seek to restore a public dimension of responsibility to literary studies and a private dimension of responsibility to law. Their arguments issue from their work as the creators of the Shakespeare Moot Court at McGill University, a course in which graduate English students team up with senior Law students to argue cases in “Court of Shakespeare,” where the sole Institutes, Codex, and Digest are comprised by the plays of Shakespeare. Yachnin argues that modern literary studies suffers from impermanence and isolation from real-world concerns and that it can redress these limitations — developing attributes of corrigibility, temporality, judgment, and publicity — by learning from law. Manderson finds modern legal judgment bereft of affective engagement with the subjects of law and wedded to an ideal of objectivity, regulation, and impersonality. Literature can restore to legal judgment the elements of narrative, character, context, and self-reflection. Together, the essays argue that the question of judgment, so integral to the disciplines of law and of literature, needs the renewal that an inter-disciplinary engagement provides.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Tax and Shakespeare

Ellen P. Aprill, Loyola Law School (Los Angeles, has published "A Tax Lawyer's Interpretation of Shakespeare," at 13 ABA Section of Taxation News Quarterly 13 (Fall 2009). Here is the abstract.

Shakespeare has been quoted and invoked in numerous contexts, but, inexplicably, the insights his immortal words bring to tax law have been ignored. This short and lighthearted piece begins to fill that gap. Expanding on my remarks in accepting the 2009 Dana Latham Memorial Award from the Los Angeles County Bar Association Taxation Section, I discuss quotations from Shakespeare’s plays that illuminate important tax doctrines.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

Aprill. What an auspicious name for a tax professor.

Law in "Titus Andronicus"

Paul Raffield, University of Warwick School of Law, has published "'Terras Astraea reliquit’: Titus Andronicus and the Loss of Justice," in Shakespeare and the Law (Paul Raffield and Gary Watt eds.; Hart 2008) at 203-220). Here is the abstract.

This paper considers the constitutional and political significance of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, in the context of fin-de-siècle Elizabethan rule, during which period the jurisdiction of the prerogative courts threatened to supersede that of the courts of common law. I examine juristic belief in the existence of an unwritten law, superior in authority to imperial edict: a theme which resonates throughout Titus, but which also underscores The Reports of Sir Edward Coke, which he was compiling in the 1590s. I analyse also the symbolic importance of ancient Rome to the development in England of a body of literature that might loosely be termed republican. The story of the destruction of Troy and its re-emergence in London as Troynovant is a literary device that was employed by Elizabethan writers as a means of establishing the ancient credentials of the English state and English common law.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Contract Law in the Comedy of Errors

Paul Raffield, University of Warwick School of Law, has published "The Comedy of Errors and the Meaning of Contract," in Shakespeare's Imaginary Constitution: Late Elizabethan Politics and the Theatre of Law(3 Law and Humanities (2009)). Here is the abstract.

This article examines the theme of contract and its symbolic connotations of societas or fellowship, in the context of Shakespeare’s The Comedy of Errors and its performance on 28 December at the Gray’s Inn revels of Christmas 1594. Central to the argument is the extraordinary advancement of contract law in Elizabethan England, and in particular the significance of the promise to the status of binding bilateral agreements. In particular, the analysis considers the promotion of assumpsit at the expense of actions for debt in relation to a society (and a legal profession) whose mores were heavily influenced by humanist notions of the individual conscience, which simultaneously bound the subject of law into an ethical association with his fellow citizens and freed him (at least putatively) from the constraints of immutable, ancient law. The Comedy of Errors provides a perceptive critique of a society which is bound together only by the market, having abandoned or mislaid the true bonds of friendship and love, through which a just community may be recognised.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Function, Form, and the Criminal Law

Martha Grace Duncan, Emory University School of Law, has published "Beauty in the Dark of Night; The Pleasures of Form in Criminal Law," in volume 59 of the Emory Law Journal (2010). Here is the abstract.

After learning that the man she loves is the son of her 'great enemy,' Juliet goes to her window and speaks: What’s Montague? It is nor hand, nor foot, Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part Belonging to a man. O, be some other name! Unaware that Romeo is listening from the Capulets’ garden below, she continues her now-famous reflections: What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other word would smell as sweet. Like Juliet, numerous criminal law scholars have assumed that names are merely arbitrary symbols, capable of being changed with impunity to avoid unwanted connotations. According to these critics, the mellifluous names and definitions of criminal law are 'amorphous,' 'broad,' even meaningless. The defining characteristic of murder, malice aforethought, is said to be 'inscrutable on its face' and 'a term of art, if not a term of deception.' The premeditation-deliberation formula is criticized as a 'mystifying cloud of words.' And the various definitions of Depraved Heart Murder are dismissed as 'notoriously unhelpful,' 'a collection of colorful verbiage' that 'tend[s] to carry more flavor than meaning.' Disdaining criminal law’s figurative language, with its inevitable ambiguity, legal scholars have urged replacing the traditional terms with words whose meaning is precise and consistent. In a concrete manifestation of this ambition, the American Law Institute sponsored the creation of the Model Penal Code, which has been adopted in part by roughly half the states. The explicit purpose of the Code is to 'dispel the obscurity of the Common Law.' In contrast to these critics, Professor Duncan’s article seeks to show that the Common Law language of Criminal Law is valuable for its meaning, its beauty, and its rich historical resonance. Rather than being a failed attempt at precise language, the Common Law terms are, she proposes, a different kind of language altogether. It is what philosopher Philip Wheelwright calls expressive or depth language, whose ambiguity stems not from sloppiness but from an effort to unite diverse associations and thereby invent new meanings.

Download the article from SSRN here.

And In the Role of Hamlet's Dad...

From the ABA site, this piece by Debra Cassens Weiss, noting that Associate Justice Stephen Breyer made his acting debut as the Ghost in Hamlet, during a conference on Shakespeare and the Law. (I assume that's Hamlet's father's ghost, BTW, not Banquo's ghost). Here's more from the Chicago Maroon.

Imperialism, Nationalism, and "Cymbeline"

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary University of London, School of Law, has published Imperialism and Nationalism in Early Modernity: The 'Cosmopolitan' and the 'Provincial' in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, in volume 18 of Journal of Social and Legal Studies (2009). Here is the abstract.

The discourses of conquering empire and vassal nation are varied, often internally contradictory. The empire may represent openness and diversity, or militarist brutality. The underling nation may represent autonomy and self-determination, or narrow provincialism. Those discourses spawn ideologies of liberation (‘the empire liberates the nation’; ‘the nation must be liberated from the empire’) and counter-ideologies of oppression (‘the empire oppresses the nation from without’; ‘the empire prevents oppression by dominant national groups of subordinate national groups’). Such concepts are central to Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Bound to pay tribute to Caesar Augustus, Britain’s King Cymbeline contemplates a national rebellion against pax romana, whilst at the same time exercising its own dominance over Wales and other conquered territory in the Isles. Parallels to the reign of James I are apparent, where England is embarking upon its ascent to empire, its pax britannica, in the face of Welsh, Scottish or Irish resistance. Several discourses emerge as hallmarks of power politics in early modernity: cosmopolitan empire, oppressive empire, cosmopolitan nation, oppressive nation.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Defamation Through History

From The Irish Times, via the blog Cearta.ie: a musing on the "gist" or "sting" of a defamatory statement.

Shakespeare on Today's Financial Crisis

Nate Oman writes about the current financial crisis and the Merchant of Venice over at Concurring Opinions. Professor Oman begins, "Over the weekend, I re-read A Merchant of Venice, and I was struck by the fact that Shakespeare manages to include in the play virtually every element of the current financial crisis." Good reading (in several senses of the phrase).

Happy Birthday, Bill

On April 23, discover your inner Shakespeare. CNN suggests these websites for further inspiration: Talk Like Shakespeare and The Shakespeare Insults Generator.

Shakespeare's Historical Plays

Eric Heinze, Queen Mary, University of London School of Law, has published "Power Politics and the Rule of Law: Shakespeare's First Historical Tetralogy and Law's Foundations," at 29 Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 139-168 (2009). Here is the abstract.

Legal scholars interest in Shakespeare has often focused on conventional legal rules and procedures, such as those of The Merchant of Venice or Measure for Measure. Those plays certainly reveal systemic injustice, but within stable, prosperous societies, which enjoy a generally well-functioning legal order. In contrast, Shakespeare's first historical tetralogy explores the conditions for the very possibility of a legal system, in terms not unlike those described by Hobbes a half-century later. The first tetralogy's deeply collapsed, quasi-anarchic society lacks any functioning legal regime. Its power politics are not, as in many of Shakespeare's other plays, merely latent, lurking beneath the patina of an otherwise functioning legal order. They pervade all of society. Dissenting from a long critical tradition, this article suggests that the figure of Henry VI does not merely represent antiquated medievalism or inept rule. Through Henry's constant recourse to legal process, arbitration and anti-militarism, the first tetralogy goes beyond questions about how to establish a functioning legal order. It examines the possibility, and meaning, of a just one.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Justice in "Measure For Measure"

John V. Orth, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, School of Law, has published "'The Golden Metwand': The Measure of Justice in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure," in the Adelaide Law Review. Here is the abstract.

Measure for Measure, one of Shakespeare's problem plays, is a dark comedy depicting Duke Vincentio's effort to restore respect for the law after a period of lax enforcement. Peopled with a wide variety of law-enforcers and law-breakers, the play implicates numerous legal issues and has consequently attracted the attention of lawyers and judges. In the eighteenth century Sir William Blackstone contributed notes on the play, while in the twentieth century judges have quoted from it in their judicial opinions. Like all good legal dramas, Measure for Measure ends with a trial scene, but - as we would expect from Shakespeare - one with an unusual twist. When charges of corruption are brought against Angelo, the deputy appointed to enforce the law, the Duke orders an immediate trial: Come, cousin Angelo / In this I'll be impartial; be you judge / Of your own cause. When the deputy's guilt is disclosed, the Duke commands that he suffer the punishment he intended for others - measure for measure, putting the Bible-conscious play-goer in mind of the passage: Judge not, that ye be not judged. / For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged, and with what measure ye mete, it shall be measured to you againe. By ordering Angelo to be the judge of his own cause, the Duke is inviting the deputy to measure out his own punishment. And Shakespeare is forcing us all to confront the difficulty of doing earthly justice.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Shakespeare and Sovereignty

P. G. Monateri, University of Turin, School of Law, has published "Sovereign Ambiguity - From Hamlet to Benjamin via Eliot and Schmitt." Here is the abstract.

The Author examines how Romantic Ambiguity lies at the heart of the legal notion of Sovereignty, applying a law and literature approach to notions developed by Benjamin and Carl Schmitt.

Download the paper from SSRN here.