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Lecture # 1: INTRODUCTION

Class plan: Eight major literary works will be considered during lectures #3, #5, #7, #9, #11, #13, #15 and #17. Lectures #2, #4, #6, #8, #10, #12 and #14 will cover fragments and excerpts of other literary works as well as expository prose and poetry germane to various themes.

Textbook: Law and Literature: Text & Theory (paperback edition) edited by Lenora Ledwon (1996, Garland Publishing, Inc). [$40.00 new from Amazon, some used at $22.00] [“Ledwon” in this syllabus].

Reading assignments: many can be accessed online. The eight major works may be purchased from Amazon.com and delivered for less than $100.00. Here are the eight major literary works each to be reviewed in a written essay not exceeding 750 words and due at the beginning of the lecture at which the piece will be discussed:

1. Herman Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor (An Inside Narrative) (1924) (Harrison Hayford & Merton Seals, eds. U. Chicago Press, 1962). Please use this edition and read the essays, commentary and observations about the story. Lecture # 7, February 18, 2010.

2. William Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice (Oxford World's Classics) by William Shakespeare and Jay L. Halio (Paperback - May 15, 2008) Lecture # 3, January 21, 2010.

3. Franz Kafka, The Trial [introduction by George Steiner] A. A. Knopf, Inc. Schocken Books, Inc. ISBN 0-8052-1040-7. Lecture #17, April 29, 2010.

4. Albert Camus, The Stranger (1942) [A Student Guide, Landmarks of World Literature] by Patrick McCarthy, Paperback 2004. (Especially Part Two, the trial). Lecture # 15, April 15, 2010.

5. Sophocles, Antigone (in THE OEDIPUS CYCLE) (441 B.C.E.) (Cambridge Translations from Greek Drama) (Paperback), David Franklin (Translator), John Harrison, Translator, P.E. Easterling (Introduction). Lecture #9, March 4, 2010.

6. Aeschylus, The Orestia (Paperback) Agamemnon, The Libation Bearers and The Eumenides (525-456 B.C.E). (Penguin Classics) by Aeschylus, W. B. Stanford, and Robert Fagles (Paperback - Feb 7, 1984) Lecture # 5 February 4, 2010

7. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure (and Michael M. v Superior Court 450 U.S. 464 (1981). (Oxford World's Classics) by Thomas Hardy and Patricia Ingham (Paperback - Jan 15, 2009). Lecture #13, April 1, 2010.

8. Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking: An Eye Witness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States (paperback, 1994). Lecture #11, March 18, 2010.

Literary fragments, excerpts and the expository prose and poetry works are identified in the assignments section of each lecture plan.

Assignments for Class #1:

1. Book of Genesis: 4:1-24 The Story of Cain and Abel

Is the judge fair to Cain? Is the punishment just? Is it merciful? What is the nature of the justice system in the story? Identify all of Cain’s crimes. Which is the most serious? What does it mean to be avenged sevenfold? Is Lamech a murderer? Is he punished or protected? Why did God reject Cain's offering?

2. Psalm 19, 7-11.

What are the elements of a good legal system according to Psalm 19? Where does the law originate? What is its source, its authority? Does the source of the law in Psalm 19 have anything in common with the United States Constitution or the Declaration of Independence. Does crime pay?

3. Read Dante’s theory of contrapasso.

[Google the word ‘contrapasso’ with Dante’s name]. Is Cain’s punishment consistent with Dante’s theory of contrapasso? What exactly is Cain’s punishment(s)? Did God provoke Cain?

Botched Executions

New Questions about the Death Penalty

News of a botched execution attempt in Ohio and a miscarriage of justice in Texas where an innocent man was executed for the arson murder of his three children has raised new questions about the death penalty.

A growing chorus of diverse voices that support the death penalty in principle are turning against it in practice because of risk, cost, unfairness, the availability of a life sentence without parole and a growing realization that the death penalty system takes a toll on victims’ family and friends.

A 2006 University of Kentucky poll showed that 67% favor a penal option other than death in capital murder cases. A 2009 report by the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission stated that 108 cases were potentially eligible for the death penalty in 2007. Public records show that no new inmates have joined the 36 death row inmates since November 2006, the last time a Kentucky jury returned a death sentence.

Some informed observers think a cluster of Kentucky Death Row cases could reach final conclusion in the same year thereby presenting the potential for multiple executions in a narrow time frame.

Since 1962, three death row inmates have been put to death in Kentucky and two of them dropped their court cases and asked to be executed.

A justice system that produces the grim spectacle of multiple executions after only 3 in 47 years is presumptively dysfunctional and suggests the system is regulated by the same laws that govern lightning: no one knows where or when it will strike or whom, if anyone, it will hit or whom, if anyone, it will kill.

DV

Making Sense out of Murder

Murder by the conventionally prominent commands attention because it shatters convenient assumptions about violence as a problem that occurs only on the wrong side of the tracks among high school dropouts with many good reasons for their low self-esteem. And while we have become accustomed to pictures of well-groomed men in hand-made suits wearing platinum cufflinks and stainless steel hand cuffs, we recognize them as high-class swindlers who are very bit as different from us as the 3-card Monte dealer pushing smack on the dark side.

Murder is the ultimate breach of the social order and society is reassured when it occurs in somebody else’s neighborhood among people who don’t look like the rest of us.

We know about and are inured to cold-blooded murder by and among kings and princes but hot-blooded murder among our own kind is unsettling and undignified and calls for some rational explanation to assuage our discomfort.

Dante had a certain understanding of hot-blooded crimes and punished them less severely than the premeditated crimes of the intellect. But our modern culture is different, regarding crimes of passion with more disdain and more discomfort than crimes and criminals that either make some sense or at least that we can make some sense of.

DV/September 13, 2009

Old Flames

Like flames that waltz upon the log
that feeds the winter fire
we danced together, two as one,
until our fated hour.

Like flames we turned our source of strength
to greying, lifeless embers
then cast cold ashes to the winds
for a cause no one remembers.

© Donald Vish

The Lincoln Institute

Original Floor Tile, The Lincoln Institute

Berea College educated black and white students together until 1904 when Kentucky State Representative Carl Day convinced his colleagues to outlaw integrated education.

The Trustees of Berea resolved to continue educating black students and by 1910 completed construction of a school building in Simpsonville, Kentucky with the help of a challenge grant from Andrew Carnegie. The stone, brick and asbestos Tudor Revival building designed by Foster & Tandy opened its doors to eight-five students on October 1, 1912.

Whitney Moore Young (1921-1971), civil rights spokesman and advisor to three Presidents was the head of the school for over 40 years. The school experienced a steady decline in enrollment after 1954 when segregated education was outlawed and closed in 1970. The U.S. Department of Labor currently leases 54 acres of the campus from the Lincoln Foundation for the operation of the Whitney M. Young, Jr. Job Corps Center.

Mr. Larry McDonald president of the Lincoln Foundation invited photographers from St. George’s Community Center to document original architectural details of the building, which has undergone extensive modifications over the years.

Student photographers Aaron Payne, 13 and Cherree Montgomery, 16 went to the campus in July with Ted Gatlin, Jr., St. George’s Community Center Freedom School Site Coordinator and graduate student at Kentucky State University and Donald Vish, originator of the student photography and mentorship project at St. George's.

The image selected for use as a note card for the Lincoln Institute is a detail from the original floor of the entrance hall and is unchanged since the doors of the school first opened in 1912.

September 7, 2009/DV

Lincoln by Louisville Sculptor Ed Hamilton

Lincoln by Ed Hamilton

These two images were taken for an Episcopal News feature article on nationally renowned sculptor, Ed Hamilton. Mr. Hamilton is a member of St. George's Episcopal Church. This monumental rendering of Lincoln was commissioned by the city of Louisville for a waterfront park memorial to the 16th president, a native of Kentucky.