The Dialogics of Legal Meaning
Spectacular Trials, the Unwritten Law, and Narratives of Criminal Responsibility
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4085303 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Martha Merrill Umphrey (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1999 |
| Volume | 33 |
| Issue | 2 |
| Pages | 393-423 |
| Publication date | 1999-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Law & Society Review (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0023-9216 • E-ISSN: 1540-5893 |
| Publisher | Cambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.2307/3115169 |
| OpenAlex | W4248088940 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 18 |
| References cited | 22 |
Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic, this essay explores the production of legal meanings about criminal responsibility in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, it examines the honor-based defense of the "unwritten law" as it was articulated in relation to the formal law of provocation in the 19th century, and in the 1906 trial of Harry K. Thaw for the murder of Stanford White. Meanings about criminal responsibility emerge, I argue, from a process of discursive conflict and negotiation between the domains of legal consciousness and formal law. At trial, competing narratives of indictment and exoneration literally enact that dynamic process, so that trials may be said to be the materialization of the dialogic production of "law" in its broadest sense
Art · Criminal law · Criminal responsibility · Criminal trial · Criminology · Epistemology · Literature · Meaning (existential · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · Law · Law in Society and Culture · Legal Education and Practice Innovations · Philosophy · Rhetoric and Communication Studies
The Utterance, the Body and the Law
Two Decades After McMartin
Science, Law, and the Body. Looking for Individual Agency and Responsability
Judith Butler, the Bakhtin Circle and Free Speech
Hidden in Plain View
Fragile Performances
Narratives of Sexual Consent and Coercion
Wondrous Depths
Legal Consciousness and Its Significance for Law and Society Teaching Outside Canadian Law Schools
The Unwritten Law of Executive Justice
Not Simply Black and White
Vernacular Legal Discourse
Heteroglossic Representations of Scientific Uncertainty
Culture of Patriarchy in Law
I'll Make Them Shoot Me
Aids, Law, and the Rhetoric of Sexuality
Same-Sex Unions and the Spectacles of Recognition
Race, Gender, and the Social Construction of Mental Illness in the Criminal Justice System
Power
The melodramatic imagination
Southern honor
The Common Place of Law
Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients
The Trial of Madame Caillaux
Making a Place for Cultural Analyses of Law
Violence and Culture in the Antebellum South
Lawyering, Husbands' Rights, and "the Unwritten Law" in Nineteenth- Century America
The Libertine Must Die
Francis Wharton and the Nineteenth-Century Insanity Defense
Critical Legal Histories
Speech Genres and Other Late Essays
Subversive Stories and Hegemonic Tales
Story and Situation
Rights, Remembrance, and the Reconciliation of Difference
| Unique citing works | 18 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0,72 |
| Citation span | 2001 - 2022 (22) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 18 |