Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present. By David Kader and Michael Stanford, eds

Autor: Julia J. A. Shaw
Rok vydání: 2011
Předmět:
Zdroj: Law & Society Review. 45:522-524
ISSN: 0023-9216
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-5893.2011.00442_6.x
Popis: Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present. By David Kader and Michael Stanford, eds. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2010. 234 pp. $22.00 paper. In Poetry of the Law, Kader and Stanford have produced an anthology of 100 law-themed poems spanning six centuries, arranged chronologically from Chaucer to the present day. The poems are organized into six distinct categories: lawyers and judges, citizens in the legal system, historical trials, punishment, exploring legal concepts, and applying legal metaphors to nonlegal subjects. Most entries are contributed by poets who are nonlawyers, although many of the selected early poets were practicing lawyers or had been legal scholars: for example, Edgar Lee Masters, Charles Reznikoff, Roy Fuller, Brad Leithauser, Lawrence Joseph, Martin Espada, Seth Abramson, and John Donne. Notably, these include eighteenth-century English judge, jurist, and professor Sir William Blackstone, whose Commentaries on the Laws of England inspired the drafters of the U.S. Declaration of Independence. He studied the classics, logic, and poetry before embarking on a legal career, and The Lawyer's Farewell to His Muse was written after entry to the Middle Temple Inn of Court; the poem eulogizes his earlier aesthetic pursuits against the noisy, grubby world of law with its ''tedious forms,'' ''wrangling courts,'' ''selfish faction,'' and other hallmarks of legal practice (pp. 36-9). John Donne's Satire 2 portrays the fictional poet-turned-lawyer Coscus as an abuser of the magic of his poetic abilities in order to manipulate law for personal gain; he castigates the poet turned ''professional'' as ''more shameless [than] carted whores'' (pp. 16-19). Chaucer's ''Sergeant of the Lawe'' from The Canterbury Tales depicts a dapper, educated lawyer who is similarly preoccupied with selfenrichment, only in this instance to comic effect (p. 1). There are various poems about controversial legal cases. John Brown's Body by Stephen Vincent Benet describes the capture, trial, and execution of radical American abolitionist John Brown (pp. 97-102). Langston Hughes's single verse The Town of Scottsboro refers to a protracted miscarriage of justice relating to a group of African American males, sentenced to death after being wrongly accused of rape in the 1930s (p. 106). Muriel Rukeyser in The Trial depicts the highly politicized 1921 case of Italian immigrants Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti (pp. 112-14). Martin Espada's Mi Vida: Wings of Fright expresses the frustration of the legal aid lawyer thwarted in his efforts to prevent the eviction of communities of illegal immigrants from various properties in New England, ''like the fortune-teller . . . [having] a bookshelf of prophecy but a cabinet empty of cures'' (pp. …
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