Category: Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature and Justice

by Benjamin Goh

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Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2024)

Abstract:

This paper reads in parallel two specimens of jurisprudence and literature that were republished in the aftermath of Nazism and the Holocaust. Hans Kelsen’s Reine Rechtslehre (‘Pure Theory of Law’) (1934/1960) and Maurice Blanchot’s La Folie du jour (‘The Madness of the Day’) (1949/1973) are historicized to unfold the ineffaceable traces, and public demands, of the mid-twentieth-century catastrophe. Between the postulate of purity and the law of recitation, it is the latter effect of our present anamnesis, I suggest, that undergirds and affirms the historical turn of legal theory.

Keywords: Jurisprudence; Law and Literature; Holocaust; Hans Kelsen; Maurice Blanchot

About the author:

Benjamin Goh is an Assistant Professor in the Faculty of Law, National University of Singapore. He works in the field of law and literature, particularly on topics in copyright history and postcolonial studies. “Reciting Law After Auschwitz” is based on research first undertaken in the NUS English Department and the Kent Law School. He is grateful for the prior guidance of his teachers from both institutions, and for the present recognition given in honor of Zipporah B. Wiseman’s lifework in law and literature.

by Ana Van Liedekerke

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Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2023)

Abstract:

This paper uses Jorge Luis Borges’ short story The Book of Sand (1975) to examine the aversion of Constitutional originalists in the United States to the idea of the Constitution as a living text. Contrasting Justice Antonin Scalia’s rhetoric of magic as used to denounce the “living Constitution” with Justice William J. Brennan’s conception of an originalist Constitution as a ghost terrorizing the present, the paper asks what vision of the text these metaphors construct, and how they make the Constitution of the other into a “nightmarish” object.

Keywords: Law and literature, living Constitution, Originalism, Constitutional theory, (Constitutional) rhetoric.

About the author:

Ana Van Liedekerke is a PhD student at the Institute of Philosophy at KU Leuven in Belgium. Ana studies the intersection of narratology and constitutional theory. Her dissertation, funded by the Research Foundation – Flanders, investigates the textual agency of constitutions, emphasizing the power of texts to constitute democratic communities. She earned a Masters of Philosophy and Western Literature at KU Leuven, and she has held visiting positions at King’s College London, Stellenbosch University, and Yale University.

by Emma Brush

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Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2022)

Abstract:

In the legal imagination, Frederick Douglass is often viewed as a “constitutional utopian” for his efforts to salvage the prewar Constitution with an antislavery construction. Rejecting the views of both the Taney Court and the followers of William Lloyd Garrison, who saw the Constitution as “a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell,” Douglass and other political abolitionists put forward a redemptive view of the Constitution rooted in both the letter and the spirit of the document. For Douglass, the fierce contest over constitutional meaning suggested the amenability of the Constitution’s “plain meaning” to abolition and the importance of wresting political power, and thus interpretive power, from pro–slavery forces. The long–term potency of Douglass’s adaptive, literalist, and purposive method suggests the importance of his constitutional interpretation for formulating a racial justice jurisprudence today.

The textualism practiced by the current Supreme Court, however, poses multiple challenges to the pursuit of that same goal. The questions that occupied Douglass’s day—whether and how to embrace a document tied to foundational injustice—have come to swirl not only around Douglass’s legacy but also around contemporary questions of constitutional theory, particularly pertaining to the relation of the text and textual interpretation to racial justice. In this paper, I will argue that Douglass’s textualism offers progressive constitutionalists a theory of interpretation that meets originalism on many of its own terms but also insists on a radically revised conception
of constitutional meaning, one that centers racial justice first and foremost.

About the author:

Emma Brush is a JD/PhD student who studies the intersection of American law and literature across the long nineteenth century. Her dissertation explores the constitutional arguments of abolitionist writers and activists and traces their impact on law and political discourse from the nineteenth century to today. Before beginning her graduate study at Stanford University, she served as the managing editor of the Breakthrough Journal, the publication of an environmental think tank out of Oakland, California.

by Laura Petersen

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Winner, Zipporah B. Wiseman Prize for Scholarship on Law, Literature, and Justice (2021)

Click here to watch a recording of Petersen’s presentation. 

Abstract:

Berlin, 1950s. Newly arrived back in Germany after escaping from the NS regime, a Jewish lawyer called Dr Walter Schwarz settles in Berlin. He opens a law practice assisting clients who are making private restitution claims. But Schwarz is not only a lawyer; he is a passionate writer: a jurist. This paper focuses on his writings in the professional journal of restitution, which are in the form of “glosses.” Generally appearing in the margins alongside neutrally worded case notes, these glosses are short, rhetorical commentaries, which often take literary forms. Schwarz uses the gloss, literally situated in the margins of law, as a genre which can return a human dimension to what became a rigid and bureaucratic process. Through his performative language and attention towards the conduct of legal practice, I argue Schwarz’s glosses offer a different ethos of restitution in the aftermath.

About the author:

Laura Petersen is a PhD Candidate at the Institute for International Law and the Humanities at the Melbourne Law School (Australia). Her research interests are cross-disciplinary, integrating approaches to jurisprudence with literature and visual art. “An Ethos of Restitution” reflects research undertaken in Berlin for her PhD thesis, which focuses on legal, literary, and artistic practices of restitution in post-Holocaust Germany. She earned a Masters at the Freie Universität Berlin and her MA thesis (in German) considered the role of metafictional narratives in Holocaust memory. Laura is a qualified lawyer in Australia and currently vice-president of the Law, Literature and Humanities Association of Australasia.