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Abstract
The article defends and celebrates Richard Weisberg's current brief for intransigence, in part by revisiting his early and groundbreaking reading of Billy Budd, Sailor.
DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Richard Weisberg, “The Creative Use of Statutes for Subjective Ends: The Case of Billy Budd, Sailor,” in Weisberg, Failure of the Word (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1984); Richard Weisberg, “How Judges Speak: Some Lessons on Adjudication in Billy Budd, Sailor with an Application to Justice Rehnquist,” New York University Law Review 57 (1982): 1–69.
2 Weisberg, Failure of the Word.
3 Weisberg lists several procedural irregularities in the trial, the most significant of which is that the law required Budd to be kept imprisoned, but alive, until such time as a court martial on land could be constituted to properly hear the case. Weisberg, Failure of the Word, 147. Several legal writers now concur with Weisberg that Vere's acts were unlawful. See, e.g., Daniel Solove, “Melville's Billy Budd and Security in Times of Crisis,” Cardozo Law Review 26 (2005): 2443–2470; Lawrence Friedman, “Law, Force, and Resistance to Disorder in Herman Melville's Billy Budd,” Thomas Jefferson Law Review 33 (2001): 61–80; Martha Merrill Umphrey, “Comment on Jennifer Culbert's Shattering Law: Encounters with Love in Billy Budd,” Quinnipac Law Review 28 (2010): 781–786.
4 For a critical response, see Richard A. Posner, “From Billy Budd to Buchenwald (reviewing Weisberg, Richard H., The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction (1984)),” Yale Law Journal 96 (1987): 1173. For Weisberg's response to Posner, see Richard Weisberg, “Entering with a Vengeance: Posner on Law and Literature,” Stanford Law Review 41 (1989): 1597.
5 Herman Melville, “Billy Budd, Foretopman: What Befell Him in the Year of the Great Mutiny,” in Bartleby the Scrivener, Benito Cerno, Billy Budd (New York: Quality Paperback Book Club, 1996 [1924]), 236. Hereinafter “Billy Budd.”
6 See, e.g., Posner, “From Billy Budd to Buchenwald”; Steven Wilf, “The First Republican Revival: Virtue, Judging, and Rhetoric in the Early Republic,” Connecticut Law Review 32 (2000): 1675; Edwin M. Yoder, Jr., “Fated Boy: Billy Budd and the Laws of War,” J. Mar. L. & Com. 31 (2000): 615, 620.
7 Melville, “Billy Budd,” 67.
8 Ibid., 70.
9 See, e.g., Charles Reich, “The Tragedy of Justice in Billy Budd,” in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Billy Budd, ed. Howard P. Vincent (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971). For discussions of the secondary literature, see Weisberg, Failure of the Word, 151, and Solove, “Melville's Billy Budd,” 2245–6.
10 Robert M. Cover, Justice Accused: Antislavery and the Judicial Process (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975).
11 Ibid., 159–91.
12 Weisberg, Failure of the Word, 142.
13 Ibid., 161.
14 Contrast Lawrence Friedman, who understands Vere's motivation as fear, rather than envy or jealousy. See Friedman, “Law, Force, and Resistance,” Thomas Jefferson Law Review, 67.
15 Posner, “From Billy Budd to Buchenwald.”
16 Weisberg, “Entering with a Vengeance,” 1182–4.
17 See Umphrey, “Comment on Jennifer Culbert's Shattering Law”; Solove, “Melville's Billy Budd”; Friedman, “Law, Force, and Resistance.”
18 H.L.A. Hart, The Concept of Law (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 269.
19 Lon L. Fuller, The Morality of Law (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1964), 54; John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 273.
20 See, e.g., Duncan Kennedy, “Freedom & Constraint in Adjudication: A Critical Phenomenology,” Journal of Legal Education 36 (1986): 518–562; Roberto Mangabeira Unger, “The Critical Legal Studies Movement,” Harvard Law Review 96 (1983): 561–675; Mark Tushnet, Red White and Blue: A Critical Analysis of Constitutional Law (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988).
21 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978); Ronald Dworkin, Law's Empire (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1986).
22 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., The Common Law (Boston, MA: Little, Brown, & Co., 1881), 137.
23 Weisberg, Failure of the Word.
24 Richard Weisberg, In Praise of Intransigence: The Perils of Flexibility (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 143.
25 Weisberg, Failure of the Word, 170.
26 Weisberg, In Praise of Intransigence, 82.
27 Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., “The Path of the Law,” Harvard Law Review 10 (1897): 457–478.
28 Richard Posner, Law, Pragmatism, and Democracy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 84.
29 Brown v. Board of Ed. of Topeka, Shawnee County, Kan., 347 U.S. 483 (1954).
30 Roe v. Wade, 410 U.S. 113 (1973).
31 Weisberg, In Praise of Intransigence.
32 See Richard Weisberg, “Review: In Search of Faulkner's Law,” Michigan Law Review 92 (1994): 1776–1785.
33 Ibid., 13; Weisberg, Failure of the Word, 159.
34 See Weisberg, “Review: In Search of Faulkner's Law,” 1776, 1778.
35 Weisberg, In Praise of Intransigence, 129.
36 Richard H. Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (Amsterdam: Harwood Academic Publishers for the Vidal Sassoon International Center for the Study of Antisemetism (SICSA), the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1998).
37 Ibid.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Robin West
Robin West is the Frederick Haas Professor of Law and Philosophy at Georgetown Law Center, where she also serves as Faculty Director of the Georgetown Center for the Study of Law and Humanities. She has written extensively on topics in law and literature, law and feminism, constitutional theory, and law and philosophy, including most recently, Normative Jurisprudence: An Introduction, from Cambridge Press.