“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity.”

 

Herman Melville’s novella “Billy Budd” has firmly secured its place in the law and literature canon, but a different law-related work by Melville is my favorite.  Over the last twenty-five years or so I have almost annually read “Bartleby the Scrivener – A Story of Wall Street” (1853), being moved by it more each time.

The narrator of the story is a humane, tolerant lawyer who was formerly a Master in Chancery and who now presides over a small Wall Street law office.  His employees include an office boy and three scriveners, the most eccentric of whom is Bartleby.  Demonstrating a certain “pallid haughtiness,” the latter at first refuses to complete small assignments and then over time declines to do anything at all.  His signature statement when asked to copy a legal document, to run an errand, or – ultimately – to seek work elsewhere is “I would prefer not to.”  In one of the lighter interludes of the story, all of the characters, the narrator included, cannot stop using the word “prefer” in their own comments.

However, the story is neither farcical comedy nor romantic fantasy.  With the lawyer/narrator as our introspective vehicle, we as readers are invited to make sense of Bartleby as a symbolic representation of humankind.  Is Bartleby basically an alienated worker, doggedly copying documents to the detriment of his eyesight?  Is he mentally ill, staring for hours out his small window at a black wall only three feet away? Does he display a hostile passive aggressiveness, refusing to be remunerated, fed, or simply helped?

The questions of course trump the answers.  After the lawyer/narrator realizes Bartleby is sleeping in the Wall Street office, he grasps the true seriousness of the situation.  The lawyer finds going to church useless, and he instead wanders the streets of antebellum Manhattan desperately trying to understand both Bartleby and the human condition.  “My first emotions had been those of pure melancholy and sincerest pity,” the lawyer says, “but just in proportion as the forlornness of Bartleby grew and grew in my imagination, did that same melancholy merge into fear, that pity into repulsion.”  The lawyer realizes that alms cannot solve the problem.  It is Bartleby’s soul that suffers, and his soul cannot be reached.

In the end, the lawyer relocates his office on Broadway closer to City Hall, and the owner of the Wall Street building has the police remove Bartleby.  He is taken to the Tombs, where he refuses to eat or communicate. The lawyer visits several times but to no avail.  On his last visit he finds Bartleby curled up and dead with his face against a wall in the prison courtyard.  “Ah, Bartlelby.  Ah, humanity.”

Continue Reading“Ah, Bartleby! Ah, humanity.”

Court Tourism

A phenomenon called “court tourism” has emerged.  Growing numbers of individuals are going to their local courthouses for several hours at a time to prowl the halls, watch the proceedings, and contemplate the human stories being played out.  Many of the “court tourists” are unemployed or retired, and almost all have no legal backgrounds.  A few were recently interviewed on the Canadian public radio program “Definitely Not the Opera,” and the interviews can be downloaded from the December 13 broadcast at http://www.cbc.ca/dnto.

The phenomenon intrigues me.  I don’t think it compares to the practice dating back to the earliest decades of the Republic of gathering to watch major trials.  After all, the great majority of proceedings in today’s courthouses are not trials, and the court tourists watch whatever they can find, regardless of how trivial it might be.  Perhaps court tourism was prompted by the extensive media coverage of the O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson trials.  Alternatively, court tourism might be inspired by the ubiquitous pseudo-court shows such as “Judge Judy” and “Judge Joe Brown,” to name only two.   Whatever the inspiration, today’s court tourists want to be entertained.  A trip to the courthouse is cheap recreational activity.

We must surely have become a postmodern society when legal proceedings no longer seem the path to justice, but rather serve as a source of escapist titillation.

Continue ReadingCourt Tourism

Appreciating Our Professors: Remembering Professor Bork

This is the first in a series of posts this month remembering law professors who influenced us.

When I looked over the courses for my first semester of law school, I realized I had a fellow named Robert Bork for Constitutional Law. This meant nothing particularly important to me at the time. It was well before his nomination for the United States Supreme Court, and he was just another professor in my mind. However, I soon realized that the good professor would be quite different than others to whom I was assigned. The politics of the law school in those days were for the most part toward liberal or even to the left of liberal, but Professor Bork was a staunch conservative. Each of his classes was an intense argument about what the Constitution meant or should be understood to mean, and he never gave an inch in a room full of students who for the most part did not agree with him. Still playing in my mind is the whole week of classes in which Professor Bork insisted cases championing the principle of one man, one vote were inconsistent with the Framers’ intent.

Bork never convinced me that he had the correct read on the Constitution, and I actually moved farther and farther away from his conservatism the longer I studied with him. Yet Professor Bork demonstrated for me a way to teach law. He insisted the law had to be taken seriously and that it had ramifications. He didn’t come to class to show us how smart he was or to play stylized teacher-student games. He closed the door, loosened his tie, and tried to articulate what was the best and most valuable way to understand what we were studying. It was a variety of earnest, engaged teaching that I wish was a bigger part of the contemporary legal academy.

Continue ReadingAppreciating Our Professors: Remembering Professor Bork