Murray on The People of California vs. Juan de Dios Ramirez Villa @LoyolaLawSchool

Yxta Maya Murray, Loyola Law School, is publishing The People of California vs. Juan de Dios Ramirez Villa in the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities. Here is the abstract.

James Boyd White’s 1972 book The Legal Imagination announced that law and literature share imaginative and intellectual practices. White also presented them as good, if quarrelsome, partners in legal education and the development of a humane legal system. Inspired by his vision and audacity, I set forth on an extended literary analysis of a 1997 California death penalty case. This exercise contemplates the relationship between the legal opinion and the essay, considering them not only cousins but also antagonists whose differences consist in their relative abilities to wander. The rules that limit the legal opinion do not fetter the essayist, and here I take that opportunity to more fully imagine the scenes and arrogations that led to the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in the mid-1990s, and to contemplate that killing’s presence in a larger political and ecological landscape. The most pressing and literally questing inquiries this essay divulges concern the roles that the oil and pesticides industries played in a young man’s death, another man’s life sentence, and the criminal justice system generally.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.