Stern on Blackstone's Page and Trollope's Jurisprudence: From Doctrine to Fiction @ArsScripta @CambridgeUP

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, is publishing Blackstone’s Page and Trollope’s Jurisprudence: From Doctrine to Fiction in A History of Punctuation in English Literature (Elizabeth M. Bonapfel, Mark Faulkner, Jeffrey Gutierrez, and John Lennard, eds., Cambridge University Press) (forthcoming, 2024). Here is the abstract.

This book chapter explores connections between law and literature by attending to print format, page layout, and typography. It considers William Blackstone’s use of the colon in his Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-69), showing how he exploits the sign as a means of achieving the balance, rationality, and clarity that he seeks to attribute to the common law more generally. The chapter then turns to Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1873). Chapter 25 provides Mr. Dove’s opinion letter as to the legal status of the diamonds that drive the plot. Trollope noted in his autobiography that this chapter was composed by the barrister Charles Merewether. What has not been recognized is that Merewether transcribed most of the letter from a leading work on inheritance and estate law, A Treatise on the Law of Executors and Administrators by Edward Vaughan Williams. It is hard to tell whether Trollope or Merewether (or both) were responsible for the differences in wording (though some are likely to be Trollope’s). However, the letter also features a very Trollopean use of the dash to signal hesitation and temporization, generally at Mr. Dove’s expense. These examples from Blackstone and Trollope show how the conjunction of the legal and the literary may present distinctive typographical features, in addition to more frequently studied features involving legal norms, analytical styles, and doctrinal questions.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.