Lusty Voice II

Abstract

As superstition has ruled our earth for the length of human experience, so too have we sanctified time. We hang our hours in great bell towers, and we glorify the calendar with anniversaries, of births, of deaths, and of events. We mark them out in millennia, jubilees and decennials. Ten years ago, a new journal called Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature promised its readers a lively, even a lusty voice (as I presciently suggested in the journal's initial number)' in that thriving enterprise called Law and Literature. Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature has not disappointed its audience. The first issue reproduced some of the work of a Law and Humanities Institute symposium at Washington and Lee University, a body of scholarship devoted to a single slender novella just over 100 pages in length, Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor.2 In a law practice that is geared toward trial advocacy, the contemplation of literary lawyers is never absent from my thinking. The uses (and abuses) of language occupy me constantly. In fact, it is Vere, Finch, Bishop Cauchon, Darrow, Clamance, the Advokat, and Mr. Jaggers, an eclectic collection of prosecutors, of defenders, and, yes, of judges, whose excite my imagination. What do you read, my lord? asks Polonius. Words, words, words is the response of that literary lawyer, Prince Hamlet. Perhaps those are the pale substitute for the sword, his way to temporize over the regicide which would avenge his father. Perhaps are the vehicle that lawyers employ to avoid the harsh realities of a brutish society. Who are these literary lawyers? Those of the real world? Do we mean the Wallace Stevens or Archibald Macleish model, the lawyers who ultimately turn to the poetry that illuminates their lives and ours? Or do we mean the graceful prose writers who have graced our profession, the Cardozos and the Hands, that do not evade, that do not turn us from our dreams?