My
lawyer dad loved Shakespeare. So
far as I know his Bard thing extended only to the
beauty and wisdom in Shakespeare’s poetry. I grew so accustomed to
his
dropping quotes here and there that years later in a college
Shakespeare course certain passages I’d heard countless times
growing up would leap out of some vaguely familiar context in a play
I was reading and bring me to tears. They were tears of reunion and
of discovery. I’ve found it to be one of the many wonders of
Shakespeare that his brilliance, his intuitive depth and his sheer
artistry teach me something new with every reading of virtually every
line.
And
I’m no Shakespeare scholar. Not by a long shot, not even a short
shot. Never had the patience to learn the language much beyond those
familiar passages I absorbed long ago. I learned a
few more
passages in the college course, along with some helpful
interpretation and sense of story, of narrative architecture. But
until I read A
Thousand Times More Fair,
I understand now, to pun a Joni Mitchell paraphrase, it was
Shakespeare’s allusions I recalled; I really didn’t know
Shakespeare at all.
I
still don’t know him as well as I should, but a farside better now
than before, thanks to Kenji Yoshino, a law professor at New York
University, whose book, subtitled What
Shakespeare’s Plays Teach Us About Justice,
would have been the perfect gift for my dad, or would be for any
lawyer no matter the
extent of his or her
wiliness
or ruthlessness.
Shakespeare shows us again and again with exquisite clarity just
how
effective wiles and a cold eye can be in the practice of law, as
well as how a judicious capacity for mercy is needed to keep its
application from being unreasonable. In
his introduction to A
Thousand Times More Fair,
Yoshino disputes
Mark Twain's argument that Shakespeare was a lawyer:
“I believe Shakespeare knew a lot about the law, but only as a
by-product of knowing a lot about everything.”
Yoshino
chose
law school after majoring
in English as an undergraduate with an eye toward pursuing a career
as a writer or a
professor
of literature, “because I wanted to acquire the language of
power, for myself and for my causes.” But,
finding his law books drier and more limiting in scope than he’d
expected, he
carried
his regard for literature with him despite the advice of one of his
law professors to put
such “childish pastimes”
away
while learning to
“think like a lawyer.” Yoshino
contends that literature is
a more valuable resource than cold theory, saying
he
“would rather deal with the messy, fine-grained, gloriously
idiosyncratic lives of human beings than with vaulting abstractions.”
Yet,
he
points out, the law contains timeless principles intended to serve as
fair measures for determining and administering justice in a society
of these real human beings.
 |
| Prof. Yoshino |
As
a professor he created what has become his most popular
course—Justice in Shakespeare—because Shakespeare’s plays
“contain practically every word I know, practically every character
type I have ever met, and practically every idea I have ever had.”
Not surprisingly the plays in his course, and in the book, raise
issues that address timeless principles in the law. To illustrate
this
timelessness, Yoshino matches issues raised in the plays with
comparable issues
of today:
-
The handkerchief that fooled Othello and the glove that persuaded O.J. Simpson’s jury to acquit both suggest the fallibility of visual evidence.
-
Titus Andronicus shows how a society without laws can spawn cycles of vengeance that jeopardize the society itself. A stretch, perhaps, but Yoshino uses the U.S.’s attacking Iraq and Afghanistan in response to 9-11 as an example of “revenge cycles [escalating] when no credible central authority exists,” considering that these wars had the effect of recruiting more terrorists to avenge their cause.
-
Most interesting to me is the question of legal trickery raised in The Merchant of Venice and compared with President Bill Clinton’s defense on impeachment charges in the Monica Lewinsky episode. Yoshino explains that while laws are necessary for a stable society, their interpretation and manipulation by shyster lawyers arouses mistrust of lawyers in general. In his words:
We
submit to the rule of law to quiet private vengeance, giving the
state a monopoly over all violence. Yet this means we must protect
ourselves against governmental abuses of power. We do so by requiring
that laws be written down and applied in standardized ways—that is
what it means to live under “a government of laws and not of men.”
But in every society, some individuals will be unusually adept at
manipulating those words for their own interest. The fear and
mistrust of lawyers is at heart a fear and mistrust of skillful
rhetoricians.
The
character Portia, in The Merchant of Venice, “represents a lawyer
so verbally proficient that no law can bind her. There are three
major legal instruments in the play—the will of Portia’s father,
the notarized bond signed by Shylock and Antonio, and the marriage
contract entered into by Portia and Bassanio. Yet Portia is able to
manipulate each of these instruments to secure her own ends.”
“I
initially admire Portia because only she can stop Shylock,” Yoshino
says, but adds that ultimately “I wonder who can stop her.”
He
points out that “This concern about the rhetorical skill of lawyers
both predates and postdates Portia. It stretches back to the original
lawyers, the Sophists of antiquity, who took pride in using rhetoric
to make ‘the weaker argument appear the stronger.’ And it reaches
forward to speak in our times, when lawyers are feared and hated for
our sophistry.”
His
description of the Clinton-Lewinsky example of modern lawyerly
sophistry enabled me at long last to understand
the president’s seemingly absurd statement during a deposition in
which he questioned the meaning of “is.” This came after a
grueling series
of attempts to pin Clinton down to an admission that he and Lewinsky
had had sexual relations—attempts Clinton sidestepped with an
agility
astounding presumably to anyone who doesn’t “think like a
lawyer.” Here’s how
things got down to the “is” question:
Clinton
still had some explaining to do. He had sat by in silence as his
1attorney
in the Paula Jones deposition maintained that Lewinsky had filed an
affidavit in which she said “there is absolutely no sex of any kind
in any manner, shape or form, with President Clinton.” This
statement would seem to be framed broadly enough to be irrefutably
false, whether one took a layperson’s or
a lawyer’s view.
Asked
whether the statement was false, Clinton produced his coup de grâce:
“It depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is. If the—if
he—if ‘is’ means is and never has been, that is not—that is
one thing. If it means there is none, that was a completely true
statement.” Clinton was relying on the tense of the verb “to be.”
As he elaborated:
“Now, if someone had asked me on that day, are you having any kind
of sexual relations with Ms. Lewinsky, that is, asked me a question
in the present tense, I would have said no. And it would have been
completely true.”
But
of course!
With
this in mind, is
it
redundant
to suggest that
A Thousand Times More Fair
is
a great read for lovers of Shakespeare as well as for
anyone studying
law and society?
[for
more Friday's Forgotten Books check the links on Patti
Abbott's unforgettable blog]
