Book Review

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Book Review | The Journal of American History, 86.2 | The History Cooperative

Shifting the Blame: Literature, Law, and the Theory of Accidents in Nineteenth-Century America. By Nan Goodman. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998. xii, 199 pp. $39.50, isbn 0-691-01199-0.)

Nan Goodman's new book makes a valuable contribution to the growing field of law and literature. In recent years, legal scholars such as James Boyd White have revealed the insights to be learned about the human condition from studying law and literary texts together. Even so, Goodman juxtaposes literary accident accounts and the legal doctrines allocating liability during the nineteenth century. The authors of her literary works are James Fenimore Cooper, Richard Henry Dana Jr., John Sherburne Sleeper, T. S. Arthur, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Charles Chesnutt, Stephen King, and Don DeLillo, with brief appearances of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, and others. Her antebellum legal authorities are, principally, the lawyer-commentator Francis Wharton and the famous Massachusetts judge Lemuel Shaw (Melville's father-in-law). For the century following the Civil War she draws upon the works of the prominent jurists Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. and Benjamin Cardozo and the less familiar lawyer-academics Nicholas St. John Green and Leon Green (no relation). The analysis combines those legal and literary sources with an incisive examination of appellate court accident cases involving property, sailing vessels, steamboats, railroads, automobiles, products liability, and toxic waste. . . .

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