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Language, Judgment, and the Holocaust

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2011

Lawrence Douglas
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In The Failure of the Word, Richard Weisberg asks how legal scholars can “justify the substitution of imaginative for legal prose.” By way of response, scholars such as Martha Nussbaum and Weisberg have sought to demonstrate the power of literature to better render moral ambiguity and situational complexity than the language of the law. The most attractive images of the art of judgment, these scholars argue, are not to be found in the decisions duly compiled in the Federal Reporter, but in works of the literary imagination. These works, by capturing a world of nuance largely absent from the Manichean terms of law, offer a critical “school of moral sentiments” and, as a consequence, can help the legal scholar to better appreciate the law's exclusion and to extend the law's discursive ken.

Type
Forum: Comment
Information
Law and History Review , Volume 19 , Issue 1 , Spring 2001 , pp. 177 - 182
Copyright
Copyright © the American Society for Legal History, Inc. 2001

References

1. Weisberg, Richard, The Failure of the Word (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984), 178.Google Scholar

2. Nussbaum, Martha, Law's Knowledge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 100.Google Scholar

3. Goodrich, Peter, Legal Discourse (London: Macmillan, 1987).Google Scholar

4. Lang, Berel, Act and idea in the Nazi Genocide (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).Google Scholar

5. Adorno, Theodor, “Engagement,” in Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tiedmann, Rolf (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 420.Google Scholar

6. Buruma, Ian, The Wages of Guilt (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1994), 153.Google Scholar

7. Michael Marrus, “History and the Holocaust in the Courtroom” (unpublished manuscript).

8. For a longer discussion of this matter, see Douglas, Lawrence, The Memory of Judgment: Making Law and History in the Trials of the Holocaust (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).Google Scholar

9. Lahav, Pnina, Judgment in Jerusalem (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997).Google Scholar

10. Langer, Lawrence, The Holocaust and the Literary Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), 29.Google Scholar