Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Le mot juste
- 2 Life plus ninety-nine years: the fantasy of legal fictions
- 3 Time's desire: the temporality of justice
- 4 One touch of nature: literature and natural law
- 5 The course of a particular: justice and singularity
- 6 Truth, justice, and the pathos of understanding
- 7 Conclusion: legal fictions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
2 - Life plus ninety-nine years: the fantasy of legal fictions
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 May 2010
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- 1 Le mot juste
- 2 Life plus ninety-nine years: the fantasy of legal fictions
- 3 Time's desire: the temporality of justice
- 4 One touch of nature: literature and natural law
- 5 The course of a particular: justice and singularity
- 6 Truth, justice, and the pathos of understanding
- 7 Conclusion: legal fictions
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Ah, my Lords, it is indeed painful to have to sit upon a woolsack which is stuffed with such thorns as these!
(W.S. Gilbert, Iolanthe, in Plays 210)the most rigorously rationalized law is never anything more than an act of social magic which works.
(Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power 42)Oliver Cromwell died on September 3, 1658 and was buried with all the ceremony due to the Lord Protector of the Realm. In 1661, after the restoration of Charles II, the body was dug up and hanged in its shroud at Tyburn; its head was cut off and displayed outside Westminster Hall for almost twenty years (Fraser 678–9). This belated punishment can be seen as the fanciful execution of a justice whose ferocity was entirely symbolic, since only a decaying corpse remained to exhibit the shame and pain that Cromwell could no longer suffer. Its gruesome display illustrates how justice resorts to fantasy in order to render its severest judgments. Cromwell was given what he deserved, just as he had been buried in accordance with a more reverent judgment of his merits. According to the new authorities, however, his crimes were so horrendous that even the supreme penalty of death was insufficient, and some humiliation beyond the grave had to be devised. His punishment also demonstrates that justice is always public in the sense that it is a civic ritual affirming social order and official power.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Poetic Justice and Legal Fictions , pp. 24 - 48Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010