Chaevitch on Faust: Goethe's Guide to Legal Progress

Anton Chaevitch, Harvard University Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures; Creighton University School of Law, Columbia Journal of Transnational Law, has published Faust: Goethe’s Guide to Legal Progress.

Goethe’s Faust can be read as a story of legal progress, from a legal order in which something as perverse as a written pact for Faust’s soul is enforceable to an order in which it is not. This raises the question of how such progress was achieved—especially because Goethe was a lawyer and a statesman. The keys to the answer lie in three significant omissions in Faust that have gone largely unnoticed: first, the absence of real evidence that Margarete (Gretchen) killed her infant child; second, the absence of even a basic trial before Faust concludes that Lynceus (his watchman) shall be put to death; third, the absence of the text of the pact between Faust and Mephistopheles. This contribution posits that understanding the reasons behind these omissions and assumptions is the key to understanding legal progress in Goethe’s Faust. These reasons are twofold: the dangers of a sole narrative that explains an event (such as infanticide) and the bordered nature of legal systems. Goethe’s Faust shows that the road to legal progress lies in the existence of multiple narratives that explain the same event and in a legal order that is gränzunbewußt (to borrow a word from Faust, meaning “unconscious of borders”). Suggested Citation:

The full text is not available for download from SSRN.