Baltodano on Borrowing the Bard: Shakespearean Fluency and the Gatekeeping of Legal Authority

Camilo Baltodano, University of Pennsylvania School of Arts & Sciences, is publishing Borrowing the Bard: Shakespearean Fluency and the Gatekeeping of Legal Authority in volume 1 of the University of Kansas Law & Literature Journal (forthcoming 2027).

This Article argues that Shakespeare plays a distinct role in Anglo-American legal culture. Courts and law schools often treat Shakespeare as a credential as much as a source of language or insight into human nature. Shakespearean literacy is a sign of cultivation, and that sign is not socially neutral. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s account of cultural capital and Annette Lareau’s research on how that capital is acquired, the Article identifies Shakespearean literacy as a form of embodied cultural capital. To judge that practice, the Article borrows a standard from Paul Robinson’s work on the moral credibility of criminal law. Criminal law can create compliance not only through force but also through its reputation for delivering a justice that ordinary people recognize as their own. The Article extends that idea from the criminal rules of liability and punishment to the cultural production of legal authority. But a professional culture that treats cultural sophistication as equivalent to legal wisdom erodes the democratic basis of legal legitimacy. Shakespeare serves as the example because he is at once a symbol of legal culture and a dramatist whose plays expose the instability of legal authority. In The Merchant of Venice, Othello, and Measure for Measure, the authority of law is itself put in question. Anglo-American legal culture invokes Shakespeare’s name without acknowledging those critiques. It takes familiarity with his works to be a sign of legal judgment, so that fluency can lend an argument authority before its merits are considered. What the profession rewards is ease. A forced allusion falls flat where a fluent one signals belonging, and the effortlessness that separates them is the product of a cultivation distributed long before anyone applies to law school. Shakespeare endures in legal culture because he supplies what law wants from literature, which is prestige that reads as wisdom.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.