The Publishing History of "The Adventure of the Norwood Builder"

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law; The Green Bag, has published The Regulatory Adventure of the Two Norwood Builders: Sherlock Holmes Crosses Paths with Congress, the President, the Courts, and the Administrative State, in the Press at 2015 Green Bag Almanac 567.
Here is the abstract.

It was almost certainly some combination of law on the books and law in the works that inspired the New York World to publish its 1911 version of the Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” in not one, but two, formats. (In its Sunday editions from April 9 to July 2, 1911, the World republished the thirteen stories from The Return of Sherlock Holmes in their original sequence, with “Norwood Builder” appearing on April 16.) The law on the books was a series of interpretations of the Mail Classification Act of 1879 by the U.S. Post Office Department (in 1901) and the U.S. Supreme Court (in 1904). The law in the works was the ongoing congressional and presidential interest in tinkering with postal service in general and second-class mail rates in particular — an interest that manifested itself in 1911 in the form of hearings conducted in New York City by a special federal Postal Commission headed by Justice Charles Evans Hughes. The results were: (a) a colorful, relatively small, booklet version of “Norwood Builder” (and similar booklets of the other stories in the series) for in-town readers of the World, and (b) black-and-white, relatively large, tabloid versions of the same stories for out-of-town subscribers to the newspaper. Unfortunately, decisions by several of America’s great libraries to discard their hard copies of the World have left us (at least for now) with the rather plain tabloid version of “Norwood Builder,” but not the colorful booklet version, to share with readers of the Green Bag Almanac & Reader.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.

Amherst College Press Announces a New Series Devoted to Law, Literature, and Culture

Announcement of a new publishing initiative:

Laws | Literatures | Cultures

Austin D. sArAt series editor 

Editorial Advisory Board:

Peter Brooks Princeton University

susAn sAge HeinzelmAn University of Texas at Austin

BernADette meyler Stanford University

rAvit reicHmAn Brown University

eric slAuter University of Chicago

The crossroads of  legal scholarship and literary criticism has, over more than forty years of  writing and research, become a busy intellectual intersection. As a ground of  inquiry, law and literature has transformed from a novel set of  proposals to a mature field of  study and writing, with well-established perspectives and positions, courses offered for both undergraduates and law students, and the emergence of  its own journals. Writers who have shaped the field include legal and political theorists, jurists, literary scholars, ethnographers, and historians.

Despite these accomplishments it remains the case, as Kenji Yoshino observed nearly ten years ago, that “law and literature has been caught in limbo for a particularly long time.”1 The early division in the field between law- in-literature and law-as-literature has been exhaustively explored. The time is ripe for the encouragement and

development of  new approaches in the field, pathways offering the possibility of  greater insights and new analyses of challenges confronting societies in a variety of  cultures and legal orders.

Laws, Literatures, and Cultures, a new series supported by the Amherst College Press, will provide a forum for this work. As a digital-first, open-access scholarly publisher, the Amherst College Press offers scholars working at the intersections of  these questions new tools for supporting research and publishing—and the potential of  greatly increased impact through immediate and unfettered access to titles we produce.

In our new series, we are seeking work that will set law, literature, and culture in new dialogues, exploring the textual dimensions and cultural work of  law and the legal frameworks of  literature. Law and literature have for millennia been closely allied, as means of  persuasion and the creation of  cultural norms.  Seting law and literature in juxtaposition permits a mapping from one to the other that often produces startling and important results. In addition, we seek work that draws literary, legal, and/or cultural analysis together in the serviced of  exploring and understanding specific social and political problems and that attends carefully to the exploration of  history.

We also seek work expanding the consideration of  these questions to cultural settings, literary traditions, and legal systems outside the common law. Of  particular interest are works that define and argue a thesis drawing on both textual and non-textual sources for which a multimodal, digital presentation offers unique expressive power.

Laws, Literatures, and Cultures will entertain proposals for works of  all forms, from longer, traditional monograph- length studies to collections of  shorter works. We are open as well to projects with no clear parallel in the print tradition. In the case of  all our works we will subject submissions to a rigorous process of  peer review and evaluation.. Upon release, works will be supported by the Press’s commitment to creating pathways to annotation and comment from the community of  scholars and students engaging with our work. While developed in the first instance as web-based and downloadable digital works, books in the series will also be prepared and released as printed works through a print-on-demand pathway.

For information: acpress@amherst.edu

1 Kenji Yoshino, “The City and the Poet,” Yale Law Journal 114 (2005), 1837.

New Publications In Iberian and Hispanic Law and Literature

Newly published in the law and literature area:

Jose Calvo Gonzalez, Derecho y Literatura, ad Usum Scholaris Juventutis (con relato implícito), 34 (66) Seqüência: Estudos Jurídicos e Políticos, 15-45 (2013). 

Eddy Chávez Huanta, Don Dimas de la Tijereta: El tinterillo que litigó en el averno, 12 Criterio y Conducta (2013) at pp.313-334.

Amilcar Mendoza, Il postino o la ardiente paciencia de los rectos hombres de leyes, 12 Criterio y Conducta (2013) at pp. 351-361.

André Karam Trindade and Luis Rosenfield, Cervantes, Twain e Lobato: reflexões sobre direito, literatura e censura, Revista de Investigación e Innovación Educativa (June, 2013). Text available here.

More discussion at Professor Gonzalez's excellent blog, Iurisdictio-Lex Malacitana.
Thanks to Professor Calvo for the information about these valuable publications.

And the Winners Are...

The ABA Journal, August issue has the annual pop culture feature: this year is devoted to "the 25 Greatest Law Novels." The panel chose, in order, the following novels as numbers 1 through 25:

Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
Fyodor Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment
Charles Dickens, Bleak House
Franz Kafka, The Trial
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
Herman Melville, Billy Budd
Scott Turow, Presumed Innocent
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
Tom Wolfe, Bonfire of the Vanities
Theodore Dreiser, An American Tragedy
John Jay Osborn, The Paper Chase
Herman Melville, Bartleby, the Scrivener
Richard Wright, Native Son
Albert Camus, The Stranger
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
John Grisham, A Time To Kill
Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God
Leon Uris, QB VII
John Grisham, The Firm
Alexandre Dumas, The Count of Monte Cristo
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Robert Traver, Anatomy of a Murder
Ayn Rand, The Fountainhead
Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Oxbow Incident
Jane Gardam, Old Filth


The August issue isn't available online yet, but should be posted soon here.

This list does seem to be heavily U.S.-centric. Which legal novels would be on your "Best 25" list? Some or all of the above? What novels by non-U.S. authors would you choose?

Update: Check out the list here online.

Starring Fnu Lnu

When the criminal justice system uses an acronym to refer to a defendant, sometimes not everyone gets the memo. The New York Times' Benjamin Weiser explains further, noting that at least one playwright used one acronym (Fnu Lnu for "first name unknown, last name unknown) as the inspiration for a work).

Law and Trauma in the Work of Art Spiegelman

Karen Crawley, Griffith Law School, and Honni Van Rijswijk, University of Technology, Sydney, have published Justice in the Gutter: Representing Everyday Trauma in the Graphic Novels of Art Spiegelman. Here is the abstract.

Scholars working at the intersection of law and trauma have often turned to literature to supplement the law’s version of justice. In this article, we consider what the unique formal properties of comics – which we refer to here as graphic novels – might bring to this pursuit, by reference to Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1996) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). We suggest that these two works offer a critique of the underlying model of trauma upon which law relies, suggesting alternative understandings of trauma in a mode which is particularly instructive for law. Although Spiegelman organizes his treatment of trauma through specific events that have defined the twentieth and twenty-first centuries – the Holocaust and 9/11 – he represents the impact, as well as the ethical and aesthetic questions of these experiences, in ways that radically challenge the supremacy of the event by showing the ways in which the event fails to be contained.

Download the full text of the paper from SSRN at the link. 

Women In Nineteenth Century English Literature: A New Book

New from Oxford University Press:

Hilary M. Schor, Curious Subjects:  Women and the Trials of Realism (December, 2012). $65.00.

Below is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

While nineteenth-century literary scholars have long been interested in women's agency in the context of their legal status as objects, Curious Subjects makes the striking and original argument that what we find at the intersection between women subjects (who choose and enter into contracts) and women objects (owned and defined by fathers, husbands, and the law) is curiosity. Women protagonists in the novel are always both curiosities: strange objects worthy of our interest and actors who are themselves actively curious--relentless askers of questions, even (and perhaps especially) when they are commanded to be content and passive. What kinds of curiosity are possible and desirable, and what different kinds of knowledge do they yield? What sort of subject asks questions, seeks, chooses? Can a curious woman turn her curiosity on herself?" Curious Subjects takes seriously the persuasive force of the novel as a form that intervenes in our sense of what women want to know and how they can and should choose to act on that knowledge. And it shows an astonishingly wide and subtly various range of answers to these questions in the British novel, which far from simply punishing women for their curiosity, theorized it, shaped it, and reworked it to give us characters as different as Alice in Wonderland and Dorothea Brooke, Clarissa Harlowe and Louisa Gradgrind. Schor's study provides thought-provoking new readings of the most canonical novels of the nineteenth century-- Hard Times, Bleak House, Vanity Fair, Daniel Deronda, among others--and pushes well beyond commonplace historicist accounts of British culture in the period as a monolithic ideological formation. It will interest scholars of law and literature, narratology, and feminist theory as well as literary history more generally.

Thanks to Simon Stern of the University of Toronto Faculty of Law and Department of English for alerting me to this title.

Bite Me

From the Chronicle of Higher Education, an examination of the fascination with vampire lit. For more about the subject see the selected bibliography below.

Benefiel, Candace,  Blood Relations: The Gothic Perversion of the Nuclear Family in Anne Rice's 

Interview with the Vampire, 38 Journal of Popular Culture 261 (November 2004).

The Blood Is the Life: Vampires in Literature (Leonard G. Heldreth and Mary Pharr eds.; Bowling Green State University Press, 1999).

Hollinger, Veronica, The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider, Science Fiction Studies 145 (1989).

Senf, Carol A., The Vampire in 19th Century English Literature (Bowling Green State University Press, 1988).

Law, Arbitrary Rule, and the Oresteia

Timothy Sandefur, Pacific Legal Foundation, has published Love and Solipsism: Law and Arbitrary Rule in Classical Drama

What distinguishes the rule of law from the lawless, arbitrary rule of brute force — which can almost interchangeably be described as tyranny or as anarchy — is that in a lawful rule the government’s coercive power operates according to principles of generality, regularity, fairness, rationality and public-orientation, whereas the arbitrary or lawless ruler wields power in the service of his (or their) own self-interest, or by mere ipse dixit. Law is to arbitrariness as reason is to mere will. In this paper, I explore the dichotomy between lawful and arbitrary rule as it has been represented in literature. I examine first the primal foundation of lawful rule, as depicted in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, in which law is generated by domesticating the use of force, through persuasion and willing union. Athena creates lawful order, not by fiat, but by marrying the Furies to “Persuasion”: the ambient coercive powers of the people — morally justified, yet dangerously personal urges for vengeance — will now be rationalized in accordance with public, logical, and articulable principles. By contrast, in Shakespeare’s Richard III, we witness the subversion and near-destruction of lawful order by a man who will tear apart the newly framed lawful order and make the state serve his own private ends. The contrast of these two dramas reveals that the tyrant is essentially a solipsist: his ultimate goal is to make the real world obey his say-so. And if law is like love, the tyrant is like the rapist: the forced surrender of intimacy is the best facsimile of love the solipsist can create; but it can never actually be love, because the two are separated by the same invisible and impenetrable boundary that separates truth from falsehood, or genuine loyalty from the rule of terror.



I conclude with a look at the dissenter living in a lawless order, as depicted in two variations on the story of Antigone — the first by Sophocles and the second by Jean Anouilh. In both, the lawless, arbitrary rule is challenged in the name of law, and in each, the ruler nearly succeeds in substituting his private realm of mere words for the public realm of actual things. What emerges from this study is that the basic premise of all lawful order — the root of all secure liberty — is that there is a gap between the will of the ruler and the genuine law. Whenever such a gap exists — whenever it is meaningful to deliberate over whether the ruler’s commands are, in fact, law — the society will, to that extent, become one of lawful order and of (at least some) freedom. The link between tyranny and solipsism is that where the ruler’s will is accounted the law, there can be no genuine law, and thus no freedom. The paradox whereby tyranny is lawless is explained by the fact that tyranny is an attempt to impose by convention what does not originate in nature — and in the end, neither physical nature nor the nature of human relationships can be subjected to such commands. The ultimate demand of the lawless ruler(s) is to substitute his (or their) word for the world — to compel the subject to love him (or them). And because that can never be accomplished, arbitrary rule is doomed to eventual collapse.

Download the paper from SSRN at the link.

ASLCH Conference Underway In Dallas

The annual conference of ASLCH (the Association for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities) is going on this weekend at Texas Wesleyan School of Law in Dallas. The Graduate Student Workshop, the association's first, was yesterday, and Susan Ayres tells me it was very successful. Today the panel presentations begin. The law school is a lovely venue and everyone has been making us feel very welcome.

The theme for this year's conference is "Representing Justice." The keynote speakers are Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis. Their recent book, Representing Justice, is featured here in the New York Times.

All Those Hobbits!

In case you have been waiting for it, here is a genealogy of Lord of the Rings characters, compiled by Emil Johannson. More here at CNN's Geekout Blog.

On law in Tolkien's writings, start with W. H. Stoddard, Law and Institutions in the Shire.