The Devotion of the Turtle Dove: The Aesthetics of the Legal Sacred in Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds

Abstract

I am delighted to be included in this symposium to celebrate The Legal Imagination on its fiftieth anniversary. I was a student in Professor White’s class on civil procedure in my first quarter in law school—fifty years ago. He taught us common law pleading! Common law pleading was at once bizarrely alienating and revelatory. This was law. And I finished my legal education with The Legal Imagination in the spring of 1976. Some fifteen years later, after I had quit practicing law, Professor White served on my PhD examining and dissertation committees at the University of Chicago Divinity School. I now have the enormous pleasure of introducing graduate students in religious studies to his work. White’s writing speaks in a special way to those studying Islamic law who see in his work a humane approach to law that resonates with their efforts at repair of the western misunderstandings of Islamic law in contemporary scholarship. So, thank you, Jim. From me and from my students. This symposium celebrates the founding of a field now known as law and literature, but the field has always had a third implicit partner, religion. I will make that third partner more explicit here, drawing on my own field, law and religion.