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95 Calif. L. Rev. 1027 (2007)
The Value of Irony: Legal Orthodoxy and Henry James's Washington Square

handle is hein.journals/calr95 and id is 1035 raw text is: The Value of Irony: Legal Orthodoxy and Henry James's Washington Square Ticien Marie Sassoubret INTRODUCTION In the following pages, I offer a close reading of Henry James's 1880 novel, Washington Square. My purpose is to show that representations of law in American fiction offer unique and valuable resources for understanding the intersection of legal texts, legal interpretation, and lived experience. This project participates in a recent trend of thinking about law as both a part and product of culture.' The cultural study of law begins with the recognition that legal meaning is found and invented in the variety of locations and practices that comprise culture and that those locations and practices are themselves encapsulated, though always incompletely, in legal forms, regulations, and legal symbols.2 In other words, law and culture are mutually constitutive.3 Applications of this insight have been diverse in subject and approach, since Copyright © 2007 California Law Review, Inc. California Law Review, Inc. (CLR) is a California nonprofit corporation. CLR and the authors are solely responsible for the content of their publications. t Lecturer in Residence, Boalt Hall School of Law, UC Berkeley. B.A. 1994, Williams College; Ph.D. (English) 2001, Stanford University. I am grateful to Norman W. Spaulding, Barbara Allen Babcock, Amnon Reichman, and Thomas C. Grey for their thoughtful comments and to Alice Youmans for assistance in the early stages of the project. James Keenley and Emily Bolt provided valuable research assistance. I am also indebted to George Dekker for first suggesting that I write about Washington Square. 1. See, e.g., CULTURAL ANALYSIS, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE LAW (Austin Sarat & Jonathan Simon eds., 2003); LAW AND THE ORDER OF CULTURE (Robert Post ed., 1991); LAW IN THE DOMAINS OF CULTURE (Austin Sarat & Thomas R. Kearns eds., 1998). Further explorations of the intersection of law and culture include PAUL W. KAHN, THE CULTURAL STUDY OF LAW (1999); Robert Cover, Forward: Nomos and Narrative, 97 HARv. L. REV. 4 (1984) (an early foray into the field); and Susan S. Silbey, Making a Placefor Cultural Analyses of Law, 17 LAW & Soc. INQUIRY 39 (1992). 2. Austin Sarat & Jonathan Simon, Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Situation of Legal Scholarship, in CULTURAL ANALYSIS, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE LAW 15 (Austin Sarat & Jonathan Simon eds., 2003). 3. Naomi Mezey, Law as Culture, in CULTURAL ANALYSIS, CULTURAL STUDIES, AND THE LAW 37, 45-46 (Austin Sarat & Jonathan Simon eds., 2003). 1027

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