|
|
|
Book Review
| Bradin Cormack, A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008. Pp. 424. $35.00 (ISBN 978-0-226-11624-2).
|
| A Power to Do Justice reads like a virtuosic cadenza on the theme of jurisdiction in early modern England and around its peripheries. The intricacies of Cormack's cadenza serve not only to display the accomplishments of the author but also to highlight otherwise elusive modulations within the theme itself. While the bulk of the volume is devoted to six sets of close readings, throughout which Cormack moves effortlessly from the literary to the legal register and back again, its framing materials indicate the stakes involved in examining jurisdiction, in evaluating jurisdictional practices through sources traditionally conceived as literary, and in focusing a study of jurisdiction on the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. What emerges are the central importance to law and political theory of seemingly technical questions of jurisdiction and the insights into legal developments that can be gleaned from the application of similarly seemingly technical modes of literary analysis. |
1
|
|
Addressing the current interest in sovereignty sparked most recently by the work of Giorgio Agamben, Cormack explains in his "Prologue" how a focus upon jurisdiction as a form of practice and a kind of practical knowledge undermines any attempt to conceive of sovereignty as a stable given. Instead, "jurisdiction ... makes [sovereignty] legible ... as the real effect of a ... mundane process of administrative distribution and management" (9). Analyzing jurisdiction rather than targeting sovereignty directly is thus like examining the stage machinery that allows Mozart's Don Giovanni to be whisked below stage instead of being awed by the gaping opening of hell. As A Power to Do Justice convincingly demonstrates, the effect of awe would never be produced in the absence of even one small component of this stage machinery. |
2
|
|
Cormack's second prefatory piece, the "Introduction," illuminates both how his study transcends some of the critiques that have been levied against law and literature and how his manner of connecting literature with law implicates history. Avoiding the tendency to consider law simply through its thematic appearance in literature, the book regards "the literary ... primarily [as] a mode of attention, one made possible by opening a space that ... is oriented toward an effect" (22). Refraining from treating the law as a stable given, Cormack likewise attends to jurisdiction as "an ongoing legal process punctuated and motivated by particular moments of crisis" (26), the symptoms of which are legible in literary works. Finally, abstaining from treating the literary object as ensconced in an autonomous sphere, the work treats literature as itself participating in the history of jurisdiction and views "literature as having direct ethical purchase on law, by being a force for and in the law, and not only against it" (23). |
3
|
|
This approach manifests itself in Cormack's readings as a powerful mechanism for illuminating certain aspects of jurisdiction. Extant studies of conflicts between the common law courts and Chancery or concerning the extent of English control over Scotland and Ireland often examine jurisdictional effects as outcomes of the efforts of particular constituencies or individuals to consolidate power, or treat jurisdictional shifts as simply means to particular substantive ends. A Power to Do Justice instead explicates moments of jurisdictional multiplicity and intersection and demonstrates how these apparently transitional complexities might prove pivotal to the task of doing justice itself. For example, in interpreting Thomas More's political writings as well as Utopia, Cormack not only elaborates More's "defense of jurisdictional variegation" (93) but also provides a justification for More's portrayal of "ideal justice as inseparable from the activity that produces law by formally describing its limits" (102). |
4
|
|
The properties of jurisdiction in A Power to Do Justice are temporal as well as spatial. From the beginning, Cormack emphasizes that even the divergence between the central common law and local custom implicated time, so that the "process at the heart of legal centralization means that the time of the dominant law, where historical present meets present history, cannot be single, but is knotted, a complex of temporalities irreducible to one another" (18). Woven throughout, the orientation toward time becomes crucial in one of the most compelling parts in the book, chapter 4, which treats the relationship between Shakespeare's history plays and the efforts of Sir Edward Coke and others to shore up a specifically English legal system and refute claims of Norman control. Here, Cormack demonstrates how the repetition of encounters with France and with the French language serves to neutralize the impact of the Norman Conquest itself. |
5
|
|
In addition to demonstrating the relevance of literary sources to legal history, Cormack's method shows how literary techniques can uncover what might otherwise be neglected within the historical record. They direct attention, for example, to the significance of the differences between the languages of oral pleading and of written reports; to the shared vocabularies of law and literature, including terms like "aequitas" (102ff.) and "inconvenience" (173–76); and to the potential for allegorical representation of jurisdictional disputes in texts as disparate as John Skelton's Magnyfycence and Edmund Spenser's Faerie Queene. The complexity of each of Cormack's analyses suggests that it will reward the reader's further study, and that re-reading will allow notes to emerge that eluded her on first perusal. This reader certainly reaped significant benefits from such study. |
6
|
| Bernadette Meyler
|
| Cornell Law School |
|
Content in the History Cooperative database is intended for personal, noncommercial use only. You may not reproduce, publish, distribute, transmit, participate in the transfer or sale of, modify, create derivative works from, display, or in any way exploit the History Cooperative database in whole or in part without the written permission of the copyright holder.
|