Bernick on Horrifying Jurisprudence @NIU_Law

Evan D. Bernick, Northern Illinois University College of Law, has published Horrifying Jurisprudence as a Northern Illinois University College of Law Legal Studies Research Paper. Here is the abstract.

This Essay uses the horror video game Alan Wake 2 as a jumping-off point to discuss and critique horrifying jurisprudence—accounts of law that evoke the emotion of horror. By centering on a horror writer whose storytelling shapes the real world, Alan Wake 2 invites analogies to legal interpretation. Legal interpretation often involves storytelling and produces real-life horrors. No legal philosopher captures the narrative and horrific elements of lawmaking as vividly as Robert Cover. Challenging Ronald Dworkin’s optimistic account of judges as chain-novelists who can creatively bend the arc of the law towards justice, Cover contends that judges are generally uncreative members of violence-dispensing organizations. They spend most of their time killing—physically and metaphysically, destroying bodies and entire worlds. More horrific still is the vision articulated by the most memorable character in Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Judge Holden. The Judge embraces as inevitable the killing that Cover laments and denies a hope that Cover left open—that of messianic legal transformation from without the system. Although Alan Wake 2 isn’t about jurisprudence, it depicts transformative acts of democratic storytelling for which there are analogues in ongoing resistance to unjust legal systems. As horrific as legal systems can be, things are not so bad as Cover and McCarthy suggest. We can transform what might appear to be inescapable loops of domination into empowering spirals. We don’t have to create horrors.

Download the Essay from SSRN at the link.