Marcus Garvey and Legal Narrative

Justin Hansford, Georgetown University Law Center, has published Jailing a Rainbow: Death by Narrative and the Marcus Garvey Case , in volume 2 of Georgetown Journal of Modern Critical Race Perspectives (2009). Here is the abstract.

The relevance of narrative in the law continues to reemerge in legal scholarship. This article uses concepts from both Critical Race Theory and Law and Economics to reassess the conviction of Marcus Garvey, the Harlem Renaissance era civil rights activist. In this case, newly discovered evidence suggests that the manipulation of Garvey's legal narrative by his opponents played a larger role in his conviction than first thought; a role decisive enough to raise concerns of unethical judicial bias and warrant possible exoneration hearings.

This paper argues that not only was Garvey unjustly convicted of mail fraud in 1923, but this injustice was also the culmination of an unholy alliance between Garvey's political rivals and Jim Crow era government officials. Together, the legal narrative they crafted contributed to Garvey's untimely death, tainted his legacy for decades, and helped to misshape the future of the 20th century struggle for racial justice.

Many scholars have noted that legal narratives often subordinate the voices of people of color. However, this study goes further, exploring how unjust legal narratives have served to warp our collective cultural and historical narrative. This larger result has had a powerful impact on the course of political events in our country. In this case, Garvey's conviction and deportation facilitated the marginalization and silencing of his philosophy of racial justice, a strategy that focused primarily on economic empowerment for people of African descent throughout the world. As a result of the silencing of this voice, nearly a century later Blacks have obtained the political and social rights favored by Garvey's rivals, but as a whole still suffer from grave economic disparities worldwide.

The federal judiciary has a storied legacy, being peopled by men and women who have defended and fought for our highest values as a nation. This case appears to be one of the sad exceptions to that rule. But most of all, it should serve as a cautionary tale to practitioners who must learn how to identify and fight the destructive use of legal narrative in contemporary contexts.

Download the article from SSRN here.

Authoring Opinions

Ryan Benjamin Witte, Columbia University Law School and Florida State University College of Law, has published "The Judge as an Author/The Author as a Judge." Here is the abstract.

For Federal judges, a life-tenure also comes with a life-long publishing deal. While some judges remain faithful to the rigid framework of judicial opinion writing that dominates the shelves of law libraries throughout the country, others utilize certain cases to summon their inner novelist or poet to add life to the pages of the Federal Register.

The use of humor, poetry, and popular culture in judicial opinions is not without its criticism. This paper is divided into two main topics; the first discusses the judge as an author. The section will begin with an examination of the audience of judicial opinions and an outline of the different styles of judicial opinion writing. The section will also examine the advantages and disadvantages of using literary tools to advance the law.

The second section addresses the role of the artist as a judge. This section will study a small segment of judges who, in addition to the law, maintain an outside career as an author or artist. Judges who fit into this group include authors of books, operas, and magazine articles, and their opinions are often written in a manner which reflects their experience. This section will also discuss the advantages (and potential drawbacks) of having these unique judges deciding cases dealing with a wide range of author's issues, including copyright and free speech, both substantively and stylistically.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

English Common Lawyers and Tradition

Cristina Costantini, University of Bergamo, has published "The Keepers of Traditions: The English Common Lawyers and the Presence of Law." Here is the abstract.

This paper looks into the subtle frame of the legal traditions, exploring the structural relationship that indissolubly binds history, law and narrative. The core of the Author's thought is that the ontological and epistemological views on the nature of historical past decide the fate of legal discourse and juridical arguments. Rediscovering the centrality of T.S. Eliot's notion of pastness as a meaningful concept that claims to be investigated when cultural heritage is at stake, this paper inquires into the active role played by English Legal Profession in the formulation of a foundational narrative with the structure of a legal tradition. Common Lawyers were the skilful selectors of the means of expression of political power and authority of Law. It is in the common lawyers' narrative and aesthetics that we meet a conscious paradigm of political theology.

Download the paper from SSRN here.

Some Recently Published Titles In Law and Literature

A round-up of selected titles published in law and literature in the past year or so.


Almog, Shulamit, The poetics of the legal system in the digital age: contemporary challenges to traditional concepts of justice (2007).

Atkinson, Logan, and Diana Majury, Law, mystery, and the humanities: collected essays (2008).

Bertini, Fabio, "Havere a la giustitia sodisfatto" : tragedie giudiziarie di Giovan Battista Giraldi Cinzio nel ventennio conciliare (2008).

Bishop, Stephen L., Legal oppositional narrative: a case study in Cameroon (2008).

Boboc, Andreea Delia, Justice on Trial: Abuse and acculturation in late medieval English literature, 1381-1481 (Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2006).

Caspar, Timothy W., Recovering the Ancient View of Founding: a commentary on Cicero's De legibus (Dissertation, Claremont Graduate School, 2006).

Chaplin, Susan, The gothic and the rule of the law, 1764-1820 (2007).

Cormack, Bradin, A Power To Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509-1625 (2007).

Danovi, Remo, Tra fantasia e diritto: List of Novels (2004).

Dolin, Kieran, A Critical Introduction To Law and Literature (2007).

Edelman, Bernard, Quand les juristes inventent le réel: la fabulation juridique (2007).

Eska, Joseph F., Law, literature and society (2008).

Everingham, Anthony Samuel, Form and function in legal adjudication: legal "meaning", hermeneutics and systems theory (Master’s thesis, Monash University, 2007).

Farenga, Vincent, Citizen and Self in Ancient Greece: Individuals Performing Justice and the Law (2006).

Ferk, Janko, Recht ist ein "Prozess": über Kafkas Rechtsphilosophie (2006).

Gaakeer, A. M. P., and François Ost, Crossing borders: law, language and literature (2007).

Geonget, Stéphan, Littérature et droit, du Moyen Âge à la période baroque: le process exemplaire : actes de la journée d'études du groupe de recherches Traditions antiques et modernités de Paris VII, 29 mars 2003 (2008).

Glover, Susan, Engendering Legitimacy: Law, Property, and Early Eighteenth-Century Fiction (2006).

González Echevarría, Roberto, Amor y ley en Cervantes (2008).

Hegel, Robert E., and Katherine Carlitz, Writing and Law in Late Imperial China (2007).

Hepburn, Allan, Troubled Legacies: Narrative and Inheritance (2007).

Hofmann, Gert, Figures of law : studies in the interference of law and literature (2007).

Hutson, Lorna, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (2007).

Jurasinski, Stefan, Ancient privileges: Beowulf, law and the making of Germanic antiquity (2006).

Kanarek, Jane, Let the story remain with us: Biblical narrative and the formation of rabbinic law (Dissertation, University of Chicago, 2007).

Kane, Baydallaye, La justice répressive dans la littérature africaine (2006).

Kezar, Dennis, Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (2007).

Kaul, Suzanne, Poetik der Gerechtigkei : Shakespeare-Kleist (2008).

Latham, Sean, The art of scandal: modernism, libel law, and the roman à clef (2009).

Lemmens, Koen, François Jongen, Droit & littérature (2007).

Lin, Laifan, Fa lü yu ren wen=Law & humanism (2007).

Lockey, Brian, Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature(2006).

Majeske, Andrew J., Equity in English Renaissance literature: Thomas More and Edmund Spenser(2006).

Mangham, Andrew, Violent Women and Sensation Fiction: Crime, Medicine and Victorian Popular Culture (2007).

Masson, Jean, Le droit dans la littérature française(2007).

Mathieu-Castellani, Gisèle, Le tribunal imaginaire: essai(2006).

Mautner, Menachem, Mishpat ve-tarbut (2008).

McGinnis, Reginald, Originality and Intellectual Property in the French and English Enlightenment(2008).

Méchoulan, Eric, Law and literature (2006).

Morawetz, Thomas, Literature and the law (2007).

Morgan, Brian James, Documentary culture and prophecy in Piers Plowman (Thesis (M. Litt.), University of Oxford, 2006).

Morgan, Edward M., The aesthetics of international law (2007).

Mueller-Dietz, Heinz, Recht und Kriminalität in literarischen Spiegelungen (2007).

Mukherji, Subha, Law and representation in early modern drama (2006).

Murphy, Stephen M., What if Holden Caulfield went to law school?: selected legal fiction and nonfiction (2007).

O’Brien, Ellen L., Crime in Verse: The Poetics of Murder in the Victorian Era (2008).

Oliveira, Mara Regina de, Shakespeare e a filosofia do direito: um diálogo com a tragédia Julio César (2006).

Olson, Greta, and Martin Kayman, Law, Literature, and Language (2007).

Osborough, W. N., Literature, Judges, and the Law (2008).

Pennsylvania Bar Institute, What literature tells us about lawyers & the practice of law (2008).

Plesko, Forrest Vincent, “A little information about the law": Judgments, jurisprudence, and (in)justice in William Faulkner's Snopes trilogy (Master’s thesis, University of Southern Mississippi, 2006).

Rabell, Carmen, Ficciones legales: ensayos sobre ley, retórica y narración (2007).

Reichman, Ravit, The affective life of law: legal modernism and the literary imagination (2009).

Rielly, Edward J., Murder 101: essays on the teaching of detective fiction (2009).

Ritscher, Lee A., The semiotics of rape in Renaissance English literature (2007).

Scase, Wendy, Literature and Complaint in England, 1272-1553 (2007).

Sokol, B. J., Shakespeare, law, and marriage (2006) Reprint.

Stern, Simon, Law and literature (2007).

Suzack, Cheryl, Law, literature, location: contemporary aboriginal/indigenous women's writing and the politics of identity (Dissertation, University of Alberta, 2006).

Talavera, Pedro, Derecho y literatura: el reflejo de lo jurídico (2006).

Tomain, Joseph P., Creon's ghost: law, justice, and the humanities (2009).

Van Blerk, Nicolaas Johannes, The concept of law and justice in Ancient Egypt, with specific reference to The tale of the eloquent peasant (Master’s thesis, University of South Africa, 2006).

Visconsi, Elliott, Lines of Equity: Literature and the Origins of Law in Later Stuart England (2008).

Weber, Hermann, Literatur, Recht und Musik: Tagung im Nordkolleg Rendsburg vom 16. bis 18. September 2005 (2007).

White, James Boyd, When language meets the mind: three questions (2007).

Zurcher, Andrew, Spenser's legal language: law and poetry in early modern England (2007).

Rhetoric and Reparations

Lolita Buckner Inniss, Cleveland-Marshall School of Law, has published "A Critical Legal Rhetoric Approach to 'In Re African-American Slave Descendants Litigation'," as Cleveland-Marshall Legal Studies Paper No. 8-155. Here is the abstract.

In this paper I apply critical legal rhetoric to the judicial opinion rendered in response to the Defendants' Motion to Dismiss Plaintiffs' Second Amended and Consolidated Complaint in 'In Re African American Slave Descendants', a case concerning the efforts of a group of modern-day descendants of enslaved African-Americans to obtain redress for the harms of slavery. The chief methodological framework for performing critical legal rhetorical analysis comes from the work of Marouf Hasian, Jr. particularly his schema for analysis which he calls substantive units in critical legal rhetoric. Critical legal rhetoric is a potent tool for exposing the way in which the public ideologies of society and the private ideologies of jurists, legislators and other legal actors are manifested in legal and law-like pronouncements. After introducing this case, I briefly tracing the evolution and meaning of the term rhetoric and examine the relationship between rhetoric and law. I next explore the connection between rhetoric and ideology, which is crystallized in the form of the ideograph and its use as a tool of what is known as critical rhetoric. Finally, I show how critical legal rhetoric is achieved by bringing critical rhetoric to law, and thereafter apply critical legal rhetoric to the case of 'In Re African American Slave Descendants'.

Download the paper from SSRN here.