Open-access edition of Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in Blackstone's England by Kathryn D. Temple

FAIN: DR-290414-23

New York University (New York, NY 10012-1019)
Ellen Chodosh (Project Director: June 2022 to present)

Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in Blackstone's England by Kathryn D. Temple focuses on William Blackstone's influential work, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765-1769), which transformed English legal culture and became an international monument to English legal values. Blackstone believed that readers should feel, as much as reason, their way to justice, and as a poet as well as a jurist, was ideally suited to condense English law into a form that evoked emotions. In Loving Justice, Kathryn D. Temple reimagines the aesthetic and emotional world of 18th century English law and provides the first sustained close reading of Commentaries as a work of high art and sensibility. Employing a unique blend of legal, literary, and political history and theory, the author argues that Commentaries offers a complex map of our relationship to juridical culture and continues to inform our understanding of the concepts of justice and injustice today.

Associated Products

Single Publication (Open Access eBook or Collection)
Publication Type: Single Publication
Title: Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in Blackstone's England
Year: 2019
ISBN: 9781479832637
Publisher: New York University Press
Author: Kathryn D. Temple
Abstract: William Blackstone’s masterpiece, Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769), famously took the “ungodly jumble” of English law and transformed it into an elegant and easily transportable four-volume summary. Soon after publication, the work became an international monument not only to English law, but to universal English concepts of justice and what Blackstone called “the immutable laws of good and evil.” Most legal historians regard the Commentaries as a brilliant application of Enlightenment reasoning to English legal history. Loving Justice contends that Blackstone’s work extends beyond making sense of English law to invoke emotions such as desire, disgust, sadness, embarrassment, terror, tenderness, and happiness. By enlisting an affective aesthetics to represent English law as just, Blackstone created an evocative poetics of justice whose influence persists across the Western world. In doing so, he encouraged readers to feel as much as reason their way to justice. Ultimately, Temple argues that the Commentaries offers a complex map of our affective relationship to juridical culture, one that illuminates both individual and communal understandings of our search for justice, and is crucial for understanding both justice and injustice today.
Primary URL: https://doi.org/10.18574/nyu/9781479832637.001.0001
Primary URL Description: New York University Press
Secondary URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv12fw61s
Secondary URL Description: JSTOR
Type: Single author monograph

---