Loving Justice : Legal Emotions in William Blackstone's England / / Kathryn D. Temple.

• Superior document: NYU scholarship online
• VerfasserIn: Temple, Kathryn, 1955-
• Place / Publishing House: New York : : New York University Press,, [2019]; Baltimore, Md. : : Project MUSE,, 2021; ©[2019]
• Year of Publication: 2019
• Language: English
• Series: NYU scholarship online.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (208 pages)
• Notes: Previously issued in print: 2019.

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.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Shaping legal emotions in Blackstone's England -- What's love got to do with it? : desire, disgust, and the ends of marriage law -- Blackstone's "last tear" : productive melancholia and the sense of no ending -- The orator's dilemma : public embarrassment and the promise of the book -- Terror, torture, and the tender heart of the law -- Blackstone's long tail : the (un)happiness of harmonic justice -- Coda: Excessive subjectivity is the new subjectivity (speculations).