19 July 2019

BOOK: Kathryn TEMPLE, Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England (New York: NYU Press, 2019). ISBN 9781479895274, $45.00


(Source: NYU Press)

NYU Press has published a new book on legal emotions and William Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England.

ABOUT THE BOOK

A history of legal emotions in William Blackstone’s England and their relationship to justice

William Blackstone’s masterpiece, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), famously took the “ungodly jumble” of English law and transformed it into an elegant and easily transportable four-volume summary. Soon after publication, the work became an international monument not only to English law, but to universal English concepts of justice and what Blackstone called “the immutable laws of good and evil.”

Most legal historians regard the Commentaries as a brilliant application of Enlightenment reasoning to English legal history. Loving Justice contends that Blackstone’s work extends beyond making sense of English law to invoke emotions such as desire, disgust, sadness, embarrassment, terror, tenderness, and happiness. By enlisting an affective aesthetics to represent English law as just, Blackstone created an evocative poetics of justice whose influence persists across the Western world. In doing so, he encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice.

Ultimately, Temple argues that the Commentaries offers a complex map of our affective relationship to juridical culture, one that illuminates both individual and communal understandings of our search for justice, and is crucial for understanding both justice and injustice today.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Kathryn D. Temple is Associate Professor and former Chair of the English Department at Georgetown University. She is the author of Scandal Nation: Law and Authorship in England, and the recipient of numerous fellowships, including the NEH and the ACLS Burkhardt.

More info here

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