Focusing On: Herman Melville's Billy Budd
Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature
- Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature
- Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring 1989.
- "We devote our first number, however, to the text that has come to "mean" Law and Literature among many of its interpreters and constituents...Melville's story Billy Budd, Sailor...The tale, on its simplest level an account of a single episode aboard the British man-o-war, Bellipotent, evokes in its style as much as its substance the amazement we feel when words are generated to make the fateful decisions of the law. In Captain Vere, the bookish verbalizer who must (or claims that he must) decide the fate of the title hero, Melville creates the near-perfect figure by which to test the assumptions of our legal system. Does law act objectively? Can adjudicators divorce themselves from the private thoughts and instincts that constantly flow through all mortals? Does an overt articulation of constraint by law really mean that the adjudicator feels or is so constrained? And if difficult legal decisions always implicate the deepest values of the judge..By what standard is the judge judged?"
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