Charles Guiteau and the Christian Nation

Abstract

This issue of the Journal of Law and Religion, dedicated to the memory of Robert M. Cover, publishes a variety of work in his honor. Some of that work takes Cover's scholarship as its subject. Other pieces may stand in a less direct, but no less important, relation to Cover's interests. The following article on the trial of Charles Guiteau is in the second category. The direct citations to Cover seem less significant than the larger sense in which this piece is connected to fundamental themes in Cover's work.The trial of Charles Guiteau for the assassination of James Garfield is used as the point of entry for a treatment of law and religion in 19th century America. A biblical text, Genesis 22, provides a focus for a discussion of a culture engaged in a debate over science and religion. This in itself would have interested Bob Cover, who was deeply concerned with the multiple meanings of religious and other normative texts as well as with problems of legal pluralism and the reality of competing normative orders. The relationship of official law and higher law, with an emphasis on the role of the judge, was the focus of Cover's Justice Accused. Problems of legal pluralism and of law and violence, were the subjects of much of the work that followed, including the discussion of conflict underlying the idea of “redundant jurisdiction” and the treatment of multiple ordering in “Nomos and Narrative.” Placed in this framework, the trial of Guiteau litigated the issue of individual antinomianism, the ultimate problem of pluralism.