The Art of Justice

2-3 Credits · Level: Graduate

In 1791, a ship, the Zong, captained by Luke Collingworth, left the west coast of Africa with a cargo of 470 enslaved peoples. After some four months lost at sea, “sixty negroes died for want of water... forty others... through thirst and frenzy... threw themselves into the sea; and the masters and mariners... were obliged to throw overboard 150 other negroes.” The question presented before an English court was not one of murder, or crimes against humanity, but whether the owners of the ship were entitled to collect insurance. But for these few words in Gregson v. Gilbert, an insurance case, this horror would have escaped history, passing without a trace. The opinion, in its grotesque limitation, was, before it galvanized the abolition movment, the only memorialization of the event. In her remarkable book-length poem, Zong!, published in 2008, the lawyer-turned-poet, NorbuSe Philip, asks, how we make meaning out of such an impoverished record? How can we talk about justice in the language of law, when it is the language of law that reduced dead men to property in the first instance? How might memory of legal wrongs nonetheless expand our imagining of justice? By pairing a series of legal events with literary rewritings, this interdisciplinary seminar will offer students the opportunity to think critically and creatively about the limits of legal reasoning—its role in both the routine violence of slavery and conquest, expropriation and exploitation, displacement and repression and its role in shaping (or misshaping) public memory—and to expand our language and imagination of justice by engaging literature, film, and critical theory. Each of these pairings will bring into focus discrete legal episodes in American history—for instance, family separation under slavery, the policing of ‘wayward’ black women in new urban centers in the early 20th century, the suppression of political dissent among new immigrants during the same time, Japanese incarceration during World War II, the disappearance of immigrant children under Trump’s first term, the American colonization of Puerto Rico. Students will be expected to draft short weekly reflections, to participate in leading our seminar discussion at least once during the semester. Students taking the course for 3-credits are expected to write a final paper on a topic of their own choosing. Learning Objectives Students in this class will be given the opportunity to think critically about the law’s claim to neutrality and its differential effects on various subordinated groups explore particular histories of racialized and gendered violence, specifically with respect to histories of slavery, conquest, and immigrant exclusion and displacement think critically about the role of law in the production of public memory or collective history by exploring historical events through various legal and literary forms. collaborate with other students by sharing presentations, engaging in close reading of difficult texts together, and sustaining classroom dialogue. I take very seriously the ethical dimension of seminar discussion: When we collaborate in constructing meaning from a common source, we practice world-building.