Syllabus & Schedule

The Rule of Law: Legal
Studies and the Liberal Arts

Weekly Structure

In this five-week institute, you will work with distinguished guest faculty in a series of seminars and discussion groups designed to broaden your understanding of the kinds of questions it is possible to ask about law and to familiarize you with or deepen your engagement with some of the essential scholarship of the law and humanities.

Each week explores a particular aspect of the conceptualization, history, or imaginative and rhetorical expression of the rule of law and its limits. Readings for each seminar will focus on the guest faculty’s body of work and other materials recommended by them. These will be accessible in a variety of formats: where possible as electronically accessible files, as a reserve collection in the library, and in some cases as part of an institute reader that will be available when you arrive in Maine.

Seminars will be held in the mornings from 9:00 am to 12:00 pm, Monday through Thursday with Friday mornings devoted to discussion groups led by the project co-directors. We will also meet for the Tuesday afternoon Forum: a less formal opportunity to engage two guest faculty in conversation with one another and with you. These forums will be guided by your questions and moderated by the co-directors. Most of your afternoons, however, will be unscheduled. We imagine this time as your opportunity to read and review the course materials, to reflect on ways to integrate the concepts and approaches covered in the morning sessions into your own teaching and scholarship, or simply to relax and spend time with the other participants.

Week One
Austin Sarat (William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science, Amherst College) will help us open the institute, by discussing its main pedagogical questions: what is or should be the place of legal studies in the liberal arts and, more specifically, how can interdisciplinary study of the law proceed? Through readings from his collection of essays Law and the Liberal Arts (Cornell, 2005), Sarat will prepare participants not only for their seminars with individual guest faculty but also for the forum exchanges between faculty members.

We begin the institute by focusing on Origins of the Rule of Law in order to cultivate a sense of the roots of the tradition of liberal republicanism inaugurated in the United States. As revolutionary as the history of America is, or inasmuch as revolution denotes at once a break from and a return to tradition, the creation of a new history here necessarily involves a selective re-inscription of traditions.

Week one thus explores central aspects of the sense of law articulated in the Hebrew Bible and the Christian New Testament, and in key texts and moments of Athenian history during the classical period. In her first seminar, Chaya Halberstam (Religious Studies, Indiana University) will help us develop an understanding of the four different legal codes that are distinguishable in the Hebrew Bible; how they relate to codes of law of the ancient Near East; and how a sacred, religious conception of history and human experience frames rabbinic judgments and interpretations of the meaning of law.

The second seminar will consider how early Jewish and Christian communities adapted this biblical legacy for their own purposes and will gesture toward how this may be reflected in contemporary American attitudes to law. Prof. Halberstam will introduce the vexed question of law in the New Testament, in particular with respect to the legacy of Paul’s Letter to the Romans.

From the Judaic tradition, we move to conceptions of the rule of law in classical Athens. Jill Frank (Political Science, University of South Carolina) will direct our investigation by leading us through a reading of Antigone—in particular, of the way the tragedy’s concerns echo passages in The Illiad and resonate in texts or speeches by Aristotle (in Poetics), Demosthenes, and Pericles.

This will be followed, in her second seminar, by a discussion first of Aristophanes’s The Clouds, then of several of Plato’s dialogues, and selections from Aristotle. We will also read Prof. Frank’s chapter on the Rule of Law in her book on Artistotle and her forthcoming chapter on Aristotle's Constitution of Athens.

Week Two
In week two The American Experiment: Texts, Contexts, and Institutions, we turn our attention from these Western traditions to the founding of the United States and the development of its legal system. By introducing the Constitution and the early history of the Supreme Court, we will think about, on the one hand, the way ideas of the rule of law are articulated, interpreted, and effected in the early Republic, and, on the other, about the way these texts created both new sources and institutional spaces for the elaboration of national identity and authority.

Legal scholar Paul Kahn will begin the week by calling attention to the three philosophical traditions essential to the cultural inheritance of liberal republicanism in the United States: the Platonic and Aristotelian traditions of classical Athens, Thomistic theology, and the Enlightenment. Each of these traditions involves a set of assumptions about, for example, human nature; the uses and limits of reason; the horizon of expectation for human hopes and action; and the proper place and function of law and government. We will prepare for this first seminar by reading from two of his books: A Cultural Study of Law and Putting Liberalism in its Place. His second seminar will focus on the seminal court case, Marbury v. Madison and the establishment of the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review.

Drawing on her work in The Culture of Classicism (Johns Hopkins, 2002) and her article “From Royal to Republican” (2005), Caroline Winterer (History, Stanford University) will focus her first seminar on the classical image—for example, paintings by Charles Wilson Peale and Benjamin West, architectural studies of Monticello and Mount Vernon—to show how the material and visual culture of early America supplemented republican ideals. We will read from her book The Mirror of Antiquity (Cornell, 2004) and study syllabi from nineteenth-century female academies and sketch the relationship between the classical tradition, women’s education, and the women’s movement in America.

Week Three
Although the authority of the rule of law certainly includes the possibility of enforced adherence to its norms, our focus is less on punishment and force than on the creation of consent. How are political ideals and judicial concepts “naturalized” so that they become internal to our consciousness as legal subjects? How do they move beyond the purely pragmatic or procedural and toward the creation of a national imaginary?

Winterer’s seminars introduce us to these questions and in week three, Imagining the Rule of Law: Cultural Underpinnings, we turn our attention to literary forms to develop an appreciation of the way national ideals find creative expressions that can galvanize a new citizenry, cultivating the national feeling that is a condition for the possibility of the rule of law.

Deak Nabers’s ((English, Brown University) seminars move the institute’s focus from the women’s movement toward abolitionistist efforts and the passage of the 14th Amendment. We will read a range of literary and political writing, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Melville’s writings on the Civil War with legal texts such as Scott v Sandford and the Fourteenth Amendment. Our discussions will begin with Prof. Nabers’s analysis of the relationship between law, literature, and the rule of law in Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil War, and American Literature (Johns Hopkins, 2006).

Nabers is followed by Lief Carter (Political Science, Colorado College) who will focus on law’s linguistic logic, its way of thinking. If we accept that the rule of law is a living tradition, one founded on a relationship with a text (the Constitution), then it is worth examining how acts of interpretation govern our understanding and experience of law, or, to put it differently, how law stages and enacts its authority. Carter will invite us to think of these acts of interpretation as occasions requiring a particular form of thinking (legal reasoning) through a discussion of his book Reason in Law (Longman 2004).

In these first three weeks, we will have developed a sense of the history and philosophical rationale for a rule of law. We will have brought that logic forward towards a comparative understanding of what is unique in the creation of the American republic, and we will have identified and critiqued some of the creative expressions through which the rule of law has achieved legitimacy at the level of feeling and imagination. Week four marks the first of two forks in this roughly chronological trajectory by focusing on the rhetorical underpinnings of the rule of law. Focusing on Language, Legal Reasoning, and Performance, we will examine two key aspects of the law: its ways of thinking and performing, and its linguistic logic and dramatic forms.

Week Four
Julie Stone Peters (English, Columbia University) begins week four by emphasizing the ways that these occasions also entail rhetorical acts and performances, that is, the ways that law’s enactment—from the enunciatory creation of a nation to the ordering of a trial—assumes dramatic form and is directed towards an audience. In her second seminar, Prof. Peters will step back from the specific focus on the rule of law and turn to the institute’s question about the future of interdisciplinary work in law and the humanities, in this case, literature.

In the second half of the week, Robert A. Ferguson will return to his study in The American Enlightenment, 1750-1820 of the tensions between religious and secular values as they emerge in the republic’s earliest public documents and enactments, such as the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. Drawing from his book Reading the Early Republic, Ferguson’s second seminar will focus on these documents, especially the contributions of John Jay (the “Forgotton Publius”) to the Federalist Papers and hence to the Constitution.

Week Five
The second fork in our trajectory comes in the fifth and final week of the institute. Previous weeks have been concerned with understanding the importance of the rule of law in conceptualizing and articulating the American experience and, more specifically, how a national imaginary comes into being. Week five acknowledges the limits of this national framework as a first order of affiliation and identification. Rules of Law: Communal Underpinnings asks at what point the pull of the imagined community is less strongly felt than that of a citizen’s more local or immediate social, familial, or religious bonds.

Legal Ethnographer Carol Greenhouse (Anthropology, Princeton University), for example, will focus on her groundbreaking work Praying for Justice (Cornell, 1986) in order to discuss the way that one Baptist Community turned not to law but to the Church and to God for justice, thus questioning the law’s reach as the central constituent of a national, American experience. Prof. Greenhouse specifically addresses the relationship between church and state in her second seminar.

Similarly, Nan Goodman (English, University of Colorado) will draw from her current book project on banishment in seventeenth-century New England to guide participants through Roger Williams’s exchanges with Cotton Mather, particularly their differing views on the relationship between church and state that lead to Williams’s banishment from the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Goodman’s second seminar will focus on Williams’s “proto-ethnographic” studies of language and law in the early colonies and their relevance to the colonial and Native American communities’ divergent conceptions of property, community, and law. 

Through both Prof. Greenhouse and Goodman’s specific examples, we will think about how individuals and communities negotiate the tension between the claims made on them as legal subjects by the State and those made by their ethical and affective commitments to their interpersonal relationships and their communities.