Book Review a Vision of American Law: Judging Law, Literature, and the Stories We Tell. Barry R. Schaller. Praeger (westport, Connecticut). 1997. 200 Pp. $55.00
| Pages | 402 |
| Publication year | 2021 |
71 CBJ 402. BOOK REVIEW A VISION OF AMERICAN LAW: Judging Law, Literature, and the Stories We Tell. Barry R. Schaller. Praeger (Westport, Connecticut). 1997. 200 pp. $55.00
In A Vision of American Law, Barry Schaller draws upon literature and judicial opinions to explore core American attitudes and beliefs about the role of law in our society. His work evidences not only his long experience as a jurist - he served on the Connecticut trial bench for eighteen years before his appointment to the Appellate Court in 1992 - but also his broad knowledge of, and respect for, classic and contemporary American literature. The result is a remarkable series of meditations that place the frustrations and failures of the contemporary legal system in the larger context of our cultural history.
The book begins with a commentary on the deep ambivalence with which Americans have regarded the law since colonial days. As judge Schaller observes, "ours is a nation of immigrants - past and present - largely self-selected from among the most aggressive and discontented of the world." The earliest immigrants from Europe fled social systems that had failed them in religious, political, economic, or social values; they sought to create a new society based on individual autonomy. Lacking common political, cultural, and religious traditions, however, the immigrants were forced to rely on the law as the principal force for cultural cohesion. This points to a central paradox inherent in our core national writings, the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution: the ungovernable of Europe consent to be governed only by themselves.
Our literary tradition, like our legal and constitutional history, gives voice to the conflict between the quest for individual autonomy and the demands of society for the restraints that make coexistence and community possible. Judge Schaller analyzes this conflict by examining the imagery of the frontier in such disparate works as James Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers and Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. Both Cooper and Ellison depict an individual's struggle to define and protect his own identity against the limits of society. Cooper's protagonist resolves the conflict by rejecting society...
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