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Abstract
This article explores how children’s literature sheds light on common understandings and background assumptions about the Anglo–North American concept of the rule of law. Three popular texts from children’s literature—Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth, and J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix—offer a familiar basis from which to consider the social imaginary of the rule of law. Each text acts as its own case study disclosing troubling deficiencies in a fictional public law order and prompting a consideration of the rule of law’s compatibility with command and control modes of rule, a reflection about its minimum moral content, and its relationship with substantive conceptions of justice such as human rights discourses. The author argues that these three encounters with fictional legal orders contribute to the social construction of the rule of law as a political good, a public discourse, and a constitutive component of democratic citizenship.
Notes
* I am indebted to Laurie Naranch at the Midwest Political Science Association Annual Conference, Chicago, April 2007; the Fellows Workshop at the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto; and the anonymous reviewer for constructive comments on this article.
1. Northrop Frye, “Literature and the Law,” 4 Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette 70 (1970)
.2. Lewis Carroll, The Annotated Alice—The Definitive Edition: Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking Glass, introduction and notes by Martin Gardner (New York: W. W. Norton, 2000
).3. Norton Juster, The Phantom Tollbooth (New York: Epstein & Carroll, 1961; New York: Random House, 2001)
. Citations are to the Random House edition.4. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Vancouver: Raincoast Books, 2003)
.5. See Maria Tatar, Off with Their Heads: Fairy Tales and the Culture of Childhood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 8–9
.6. On the British boarding school genre, see Colin Manlove, From Alice to Harry Potter: Children’s Fantasy in England (Christchurch: Cybereditions, 2003), 185–86
. See also David K. Steege, “Harry Potter, Tom Brown, and the British School Story,” in The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lana A. Whited (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002) .7. Celia Catlett Anderson & Marilyn Fain Apseloff, “Some Definitions of Nonsense,” Nonsense Literature for Children: Aesop to Seuss (Hamden, CT: Library Professional Publications, 1989), 4–5
.8. See Alison Lurie, Don’t Tell the Grown-Ups: Subversive Children’s Literature (Boston: Little Brown, 1990)
.9. See Bruno Bettelheim, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales (New York: Knopf, 1976)
.10. Laura C. Barry, The Child, the State, and the Victorian Novel (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1999), 4–5
.11. F. J. Harvey Darton, Children’s Books in England: Five Centuries of Social Life, 3rd ed., rev. Brian Alderson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 260
.12. John Morison, “Stories for Good Children,” in Tall Stories? Reading Law and Literature, ed. John Morison and Christine Bell (Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth, 1996)
.13. See Desmond Manderson, “From Hunger to Love: Myths of the Source, Interpretation, and Constitution of Law in Children’s Literature,” 15 Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 87 (2003)
.14. See Ian Ward, “Children’s Literature and Legal Ideology,” Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
15. I rely on the following texts for this condensed understanding: T. R. S. Allan, Constitutional Justice: A Liberal Theory of the Rule of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001)
; Richard Bellamy, ed., The Rule of Law and the Separation of Powers (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate/Dartmouth, 2005) ; Albert V. Dicey, Introduction to the Study of the Law of the Constitution, 8th ed. (Holmes Beach, FL: Gaunt, 1996) ; Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law, rev. ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press: 1969) ; Joseph Raz, “The Rule of Law and Its Virtue,” The Authority of Law: Essays on Law and Morality (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979) ; Brian Z. Tamanaha, On the Rule of Law: History, Politics, Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) ; and Jeremy Waldron, “Is the Rule of Law an Essentially Con-Con-tested Concept (in Florida)?” 21 Law and Philosophy 137 (2002).16. Rawls’s early work incorporated Jean Piaget’s research on the development of moral reasoning in children. For applications of Piaget in children’s literature, see Ward, supra note 14, and also Lana A. Whited with M. Katherine Grimes, who incorporate Lawrence Kohlberg’s further work on moral reasoning in “What Would Harry Do?: J. K. Rowling and Lawrence Kohlberg’s Theories of Moral Development,” in The Ivory Tower and Harry Potter: Perspectives on a Literary Phenomenon, ed. Lana A. Whited (Columbia and London: University of Missouri Press, 2002).
17. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999), 207
.18. Carroll, supra note 2, at 251.
19. For more on this interpretation of Alice in Wonderland, see Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990)
.20. Carroll, supra note 2, at 85.
21. Id. at 95.
22. Fuller, supra note 15, at 74.
23. Carroll, supra note 2, at 86.
24. Fuller, supra note 15, at 205.
25. Id. at 220.
26. Carroll, supra note 2, at 95.
27. Id. at 256–57.
28. Other possible responses include: because there is an “n” in neither, and because each begins with the letter “e” Carroll’s own answer was: “It is nevar put with the wrong end in front.” The misspelling is deliberate as “nevar” is “raven” spelled backwards.
29. Carroll, supra note 2, at 123.
30. Id. at 210.
31. Id. at 213.
32. Id. at 161.
33. W. H. Auden, “Today’s ‘Wonder-World’ Needs Alice,” in Aspects of Alice: Lewis Carroll’s Dreamchild as Seen Through the Critics’ Looking-Glasses, ed. Robert Phillips (New York: Vanguard Press, 1971), 9–10
.34. The Caterpillar is the first character of many who poses this question to Alice. Carroll, supra note 2, at 47.
35. Id. at 163.
36. Id. at 219.
37. Id. at 173.
38. Chapter 7, “The Lion and the Unicorn,” is a lengthy pun on this phrase.
39. Fuller, supra note 15, at 29.
40. Carroll, supra note 2, at 235.
41. Fuller, supra note 15, at 159.
42. See Duncan Black, A Mathematical Approach to Proportional Representation: Duncan Black on Lewis Carroll, ed. I. McLean, A. McMillan & B. L. Monroe (Boston: Kluwer, 1996)
.43. Carroll, supra note 2, at 120.
44. Fuller, supra note 15, at 39.
45. Carroll, supra note 2, at 196–97.
46. Id. at 124.
47. Id. at 93.
48. Id. at 266.
49. Id. at 233.
50. Juster, supra note 3, at 175.
51. Juster, id. at 24.
52. Fuller, supra note 15, at 71.
53. Juster, supra note 3, at 26.
54. Id. at 85.
55. Fuller, supra note 15, at 197.
56. Juster, supra note 3, at 233.
57. William P. MacNeil, “‘Kidlit’ as ‘Law-and-Lit’: Harry Potter and the Scales of Justice,” 14 Cardozo Studies in Law & Literature 545–64 (2002).
58. Rowling, supra note 4, at 131.
59. Id. at 137.
60. Id.
61. Id. at 274–75.
62. Id. at 313.
63. Id. at 368.
64. Id.
65. Id. at 486.
66. Id. at 512.
67. Susan Hall, “Harry Potter and the Rule of Law: The Central Weakness of Legal Concepts in the Wizard World,” in Reading Harry Potter: Critical Essays, ed. G. L. Anatol (Westport, CT and London: Praeger, 2003), 149–50.
68. Id. at 148.
69. MacNeil, supra note 57, at 545.
70. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Vancouver, BC: Raincoast Books, 2000), 33.
71. See Aaron Schwabach, “Harry Potter and the Unforgivable Curses: Norm-formation, Inconsistency, and the Rule of Law in the Wizarding World,” 11 Roger Williams University Law Review 325–26 (2006)
.72. Id. at 309.
73. Id. at 350.
74. MacNeil, supra note 57, at 552–55.
75. Id. at 557.
76. Benjamin H. Barton, “Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy,” 104 Michigan Law Review 1526 (2006).
77. Id. at 1533.
78. Id. at 1536–37.
79. Fuller, supra note 15, at 186.
80. Paul W. Kahn, The Cultural Study of Law (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 45.
81. Carroll, supra note 2, at 114.