The Right to Not Cut Our Owne Throats with Our Tongues: Proverbial Roots of the Fifth Amendment

Abstract

As Leonard Williams Levy discussed in Origins of the Fifth Amendment and other works, the expression advising against cutting “our owne throats with our tongues” exemplifies the complex referential matrix of the United States Constitution’s clause against self-incrimination. By tracing the sources of this paradigmatic phrase, it is possible to identify several traditions in which these words have particular significance, while documenting a conceptual drift similar to the unpredictable dynamics at work in the crystallization of proverbs. An appraisal of the poetic, conceptual, and cultural tenets underlying this image allows for the reconstruction of the connections among oral and written references belonging to vernacular, biblical, Arabic, and Greco-Roman traditions. Moreover, this analysis discloses associations relating to childhood, madness, inebriety, and barbershops that facilitate a reassessment of both the roots of the Bill of Rights’ provision against self-incrimination and the legal traditions in which “the Fifth” has been usually framed.