Fyodor Dostoevsky
Encyclopedia of Political Thought. Ed. by Michael Gibbons
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Parables of Revenge and Masculinity in Clint Eastwood's Mystic River
Law, Culture, and the Humanities v. 1, #3 (2005) (With Drucilla Cornell)
- Reprinted in Clint Eastwood and Issues of American Masculinity, Drucilla Cornell (Fordham University Press, 2009).
This paper offers a reading of Clint Eastwood's film Mystic River. Mystic River differs from archetypal Hollywood revenge movies in one important way: the act of revenge kills the wrong man. Moreover, instead of abandoning its wayward avenger, the movie strives to defend or at least to understand the act of wrongful vengeance as the loving act of a kingly father. To explore the connection between trauma, masculinity, and revenge, the paper follows the stories of the film's three male protagonists. Dave is defeated by his boyhood trauma and never recovers. Jimmy, the film's avenger, forcefully resists the dehumanizing power of the loss of his daughter by taking revenge. Sean neither succumbs to trauma nor masters it. Instead, Sean –when confronted by his wife's silent departure and with the fact of Jimmy's vengeance –responds by admitting his vulnerability. An upright man struggling to balance his masculinity with the reality of his tragic limitations, Sean's willingness to accept his human finitude is set against Jimmy's rebellious insistence on his superhuman justice based on the prerogative of vengeance.
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The Accusers: Law, Justice, and the Image of Prosecutors in Hollywood
Griffith Faculty Law Review v. 13, #2 (2005)
This essay begins with the observation that the American culture industry is nearly incapable of presenting state prosecutors in a positive light. Through readings of three apparent exceptions to this rule, the essay argues that prosecutors can only be heroically and positively conceived on screen when they abandon their traditional association with law and seek to do justice beyond the laws. To the extent that prosecutors can be seen as a proxy for the image of the ideal of legal justice itself, this essay argues that the imagining of prosecutorial justice in Hollywood shows that law has lost its once-assumed connection with justice.
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Crossing the Warrior Path
Rechtshistorisches Journal, Volume 16, 1998. Review essay on Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon
“‘It goes back,’” Thomas Pynchon invites us to imagine, “‘ to the second Day of Creation, when ‘G-d made the Firmament, and divided the Waters which were under the Firmament, from the waters which were above the Frimament,’ -- thus the first boundary Line. All else after that, in all History, is but Sub-Division.’”
In the beginning was sub-division, which is to say: In the beginning was the lawsuit. And how different is that from the Word? Are not theology and jurisprudence sister sciences, dedicated to the proper -- or must we today say authoritative? -- interpretation of manifested truths -- or must we say desires? If theology endeavors to rightly discipline the expression of desire, the functional essence of the lawsuit is instead the authoritative resolution of conflicting desires. The traditional bridge between theology and jurisprudence consists, of course, in the latter’s purported subsumption to the former.
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