(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.
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