Introduction

College Literature has a long history of supporting interest in the law and literature movement, from periodic review essays that up-date new works in the field (1994, 20.1; 1996, 23.1; 2003, 30.1) to the present special issue on law and literature, which supplements an earlier special issue, Law, Literature, and Interdisciplinarity, in 1998 (25.1). The journal’s interest is not merely in disciplinary footprints left by law on literature or literature on law, but on the interdisciplinary effects that result from interfaces that change perspectives, result in findings that neither discipline could support on its own, or that introduce innovative methods of study.

In the present special issue, we offer a concentration of studies that begin with a consideration of the responsibility law owes to ethics and range from examinations of law in such literature as Anthony Trollope’s Phineas Redux, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes mysteries, and the political writings of Samuel Coleridge to constructions of legal decisions invoking race and law in Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), Brown v. Board of Education (1954), and Parents Involved v. Seattle (2007), addressing jury issues in the trials of John Peter Zenger (1735) and Eleazer Oswald (1783), raising issues of sexual conduct in the trials of Oscar Wilde (1895), and considering serial murder in the trial of Dr. Thomas Cream (1892).

Patrick Hogan’s “Tragic Lives: On the Incompatibility of Law and Ethics” argues that ethics and law are essentially and necessarily incommensurate, as opposed to the common view that holds the two should be compatible. On issues of evaluation of harms, nature of punishment, and individual versus social focus, as well as agency versus determinism and deterrence versus reparation, clear conflict exists to oppose law and ethics to each other. The conflict is, moreover, one that extends throughout society, to the point that it can be considered pervasive and unavoidable. In this, Hogan contends, lies the tragic element associated with the law—its inability to escape the conflict between the demands of ethics and the law, particularly when they are put to the ultimate test—the call for ethical constraints on the death penalty. Hogan explores the conflict in two venues: the film Decalogue V by Krzysztof Kieslowski and Aeschylus’ Eumenides.

Catharine O. Frank’s “Trial Separations: Divorce, Disestablishment, and Home Rule in Phineas Redux” takes us to a more concrete working out of the operations of law as it pursues divorce law in Anthony Trollope’s novel (1874). The divorce of which she speaks is, nevertheless, as endemic as Hogan’s conflict, for it pervades church and state relations as well as family life and is trumped only by a murder trial. Through the trial, Irish home rule is implicated, which turns Frank’s argument back on itself to the issue of “family,” albeit writ large. Law, in sum, runs from the personal through the political and, in the novel itself, constructs the characters that inhabit both realms. Frank’s choice of novel is, in this sense, unassailable, for it runs rife with the law through all its domains—familial, national, religious—to give us a trial of a man’s soul as much as a trial of a community’s.

Paula J. Reiter’s “Doctors, Detectives, and the Professional Ideal: The Trial of Thomas Neill Cream and the Mastery of Sherlock Holmes” covers the same period but from a different tradition—the detective novel—to examine a realm much darker and private than that of Trollope’s work. The world of prostitutes and professionals puts Conan Doyle—a physician himself—in touch with a real-life physician-criminal who has, like the author, turned away from his profession to enter the world of crime, each “writing” himself into that world, the one with a pen and the other with poison. Reiter pits Conan Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes against Dr. Cream to explore “the collapse of distinctions between the professional and the ‘other’,” using “The Man With the Twisted Lip,” among other tales, as the venue for Conan Doyle’s reflections and the Lambeth murders and trial for Dr. Cream’s palette.

Lesley Higgins and Marie-Christine...