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The Dialogics of Legal Meaning: Spectacular Trials, the Unwritten Law, and Narratives of Criminal Responsibility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Martha Merrill Umphrey
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Abstract

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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.

Type
Professional and Popular Conceptions of Criminal Responsibility
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , 1999 , pp. 393 - 423
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Law and Society Association.

Footnotes

I owe great thanks to Karen Merrill, Lawrence Douglas, Jay Grossman, Nasser Hus-sain, Austin Sarat, Susan Silbey, Alison Young, and several anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments.

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