By the Hands of Rhea: Notes on the Juridical Meaning of the Bear

Abstract

This article follows some tracks of an animal (the bear) in the work of jurisprudence. Starting with the common law of civil liability for keepers of bears, this article explores the significance of the bear in nineteenth-century case law and legal philology, showing that the animal itself does not leave the historical contours of legal doctrine unmodified. Reflecting in particular on the work of nineteenth-century Swiss jurist and philologist, Johann Jakob Bachofen, the article examines the imprint that the bear leaves in legal literature and the implications to be drawn from the historical attempts to search for an elusive maternal symbolic in jurisprudence. To speak of an animal in its relation to ‘right’ requires attention first of all to be paid to the distinct shape and the distinct gender this animal has acquired in the thought and discipline of law.