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Full-Text Articles in Law and Society
The Chow: Depictions Of The Criminal Justice System As A Character In Crime Fiction, Marianne Wesson
The Chow: Depictions Of The Criminal Justice System As A Character In Crime Fiction, Marianne Wesson
Publications
Having been honored by a request to contribute to a Symposium honoring my talented friend Alafair Burke, I composed this essay describing the various ways the criminal justice system has been depicted in English-language crime fiction. This survey, necessarily highly selective, considers portrayals penned by writers from Dickens to Tana French. Various dimensions of comparison include the authors’ apparent beliefs about the rule of law (from ridiculously idealistic to uncompromisingly cynical), the characters’ professional perspectives (private detective, police officer, prosecutor, defense lawyer, judge, victim, accused), and the protagonists’ status as institutional insiders or outsiders or occupants of the uncomfortable middle. …
[N]Ot A Story To Pass On: Constructing Mothers Who Kill, Susan Ayres
[N]Ot A Story To Pass On: Constructing Mothers Who Kill, Susan Ayres
Susan Ayres
Toni Morrison has said in her Nobel acceptance speech, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” How we “do language” in judicial decisions about infanticide can perhaps be compared to and informed by fiction such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Beloved provides a fictional account of the life of a historical woman, a slave who escaped to freedom and then attempted to kill all four of her children, successfully killing one when her master came to claim her under the Fugitive Slave Act. In addition to …
[N]Ot A Story To Pass On: Constructing Mothers Who Kill, Susan Ayres
[N]Ot A Story To Pass On: Constructing Mothers Who Kill, Susan Ayres
Faculty Scholarship
Toni Morrison has said in her Nobel acceptance speech, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” How we “do language” in judicial decisions about infanticide can perhaps be compared to and informed by fiction such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved.
Beloved provides a fictional account of the life of a historical woman, a slave who escaped to freedom and then attempted to kill all four of her children, successfully killing one when her master came to claim her under the Fugitive Slave Act. In addition to …