Money in Law and Literature: Celebrating Interdisciplinarity via Scholarship, Music, Drama
Professor Richard McAdams had just told Assistant Professor William Baude not to apologize to Professor Martha C. Nussbaum. And Nussbaum—or, rather, her character in the excerpt of George Bernard Shaw’s “Major Barbara”—was indignant.
“I quite understand, Stephen,” Nussbaum, as Lady Britomart Undershaft, cried. “By all means, go your own way—if you feel strong enough.”
The moment, like several in the performance that ended Day Two of the biennial Law and Literature Conference, was draped in both commentary and humor. Baude’s character had just told his parents, played by Nussbaum and McAdams, that he didn’t care to inherit the munitions fortune his estranged father had already planned to deny him; now the question was whether Stephen Undershaft had a less distasteful pursuit in mind.
“A philosopher, perhaps?” McAdams-as-Andrew Undershaft said, reciting Shaw’s words as the philosopher Nussbaum looked on.
“I make no such ridiculous pretension,” Baude-as-Stephen replied, drawing chuckles from the audience in the Law School’s Courtroom. A moment later he rejected law as well: “I am afraid I have not the necessary push—I believe that is that name barristers give to their vulgarity—for success in pleading.”
The performance of Act III of “Major Barbara,” along with musical numbers from “The Threepenny Opera,” continued the theatrical tradition of a conference that is, in many ways, an ode to interdisciplinarity—one that draws on music, drama, faculty scholarship, student papers, and a keynote speech to reflect on a single topic through the dual lens of law and literature. This year, it was “Money in Law and Literature: From the Industrial Revolution to the Great Depression (and Beyond).” And Shaw’s argument in favor of addressing poverty through economic growth—rather than through the philanthropy favored by title character Barbara Undershaft, played by Professor Alison LaCroix—offered insight into the tussle between morality and economic power in Victorian-era America.
“It was an all-round team effort, and a great success,” said Nussbau
m, the Ernst Freund Professor of Law and Ethics, who organized the conference with LaCroix, the Robert Newton Reid Professor of Law, and Saul Levmore, the William B. Graham Distinguished Service Professor of Law. “The papers, both those by our faculty and students and those by visitors, were of unusually high quality, promising a terrific book. And the work that people poured into the musical and dramatic performances was just amazing. It wasn't just the high level of talent on display, it was also the investment of emotion and imagination, together with remarkable teamwork, that lifted these productions to a new level.”
The conference was the fifth in a series that began in 2009; previous themes were Crime in Law and Literature (2014), Manhood in American Law and Literature (2012), Gender, Law and the British Novel (2010), and Shakespeare and the Law (2009). Three books based on the conferences have already been published and a fourth is in production.
“These conferences push some of us out of our comfort zones,” said Levmore, who this year wrote about John Dos Passos’s 1936 novel The Big Money. “Personally, I do not think of the content of a novel as evidence of how law really affects behavior, or how life was experienced in a given period—inasmuch as these are fictional works, and authors have their biases and storytelling habits. On the other hand, an influential or moving novel tells us something about where people think law is cruel or heroic, as the case may be. In my own paper on Dos Passos, a Depression-Prohibition period work, I explored the idea of greed, and have come to think that there is no real line between ambition and greed, though perhaps some novelists would like us to think the line is clear.”
The conference began with papers presented by five students, then moved into two days of sessions in which Law School faculty and colleagues from other institutions explored a variety of themes at the intersection of law, money, and culture via four major literary genres: Nineteenth-Century Britain, Nineteenth-Century United States, the Golden Age and the Great Depression, and Religion, Race, Poetry. Other papers included “Wealth and Warfare in the Novels of Jane Austen,” by Jonathan Masur, the John P. Wilson Professor of Law, and Seebany Datta-Barua, an assistant professor of engineering at Illinois Institute of Technology; “Money and Art in Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward,” by Douglas Baird, the Harry A. Bigelow Distinguished Service Professor of Law; “Raisin, Race, and The Real Estate Revolution of the Early Twentieth Century,” by Carol Rose of Yale University; and “The Morning and Evening Star: Religion, Money, and Love in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt and Elmer Gantry,” by Nussbaum; and “Bartleby’s Consensual Dysphoria,” by Robin West of Georgetown University. (A complete list of presentations, and links to many of the papers and the program for the performances, can be found online).
“The law-and-literature conferences are terrific opportunities for colleagues who work in various areas, both here in the Law School and throughout the broader academic community, to engage in interdisciplinary work that focuses on the humanities,” said LaCroix, who discussed “Commerce, Law, and Revolution in the Novels of Elizabeth Gaskell and Charlotte Brontë. “It’s a special type of law school that would be able, and willing, to throw itself wholeheartedly into writing papers and giving talks on works by Austen, Fitzgerald, Hansberry, and Trollope, to name just a few.”
LaCroix noted that writing about the economy and “condition” of nineteenth-century England was a satisfying complement to her work on a new book exploring American nineteenth-century commerce and constitutional law. At the conference, LaCroix explored interconnected themes of commerce, law, and revolution through three novels that portrayed the impact of England’s Industrial Revolution on society and individuals, particularly women. In the discussion period that followed, Nussbaum referenced the books’ commentary on the vulnerability of unmarried women working in the factories, and wondered whether it reflected a general position that no women should work in the factories.
“This is very interesting because at the beginning of Mary Barton [the 1848 novel by Gaskell], much is made of the fact that Mary has to get a job, and she and her father both agree that she shouldn’t go work in a factory. Instead she is an apprentice to a dressmaker,” LaCroix responded. “She views this as more agreeable and more genteel … But then later [her aunt] is afraid that because Mary works in a dressmaker’
s shop, walks to and from the shop alone, and is out late at night—which is unbelievable as you read the novel; she’s just roaming the streets of Manchester—it will lead her to become a fallen women like [her aunt]. Would she be better off in the factory? It at least would be more regimented.”
The exchange illustrated a key element of the conference: the chance to reflect on various intricacies in the relationships among law, culture, and economy—an experience that keynote speaker Lawrence H. Summers, an economist, professor, and the former president of Harvard University, acknowledged. He said that preparing for his talk, “Melville, Manufacturing, Machinery and the Modern Economy,” led him to venture outside his comfort zone and consider economic issues from a slightly different angle.
“I was guided to reflect on aspects of the modern economy that I mig
ht never have been led to reflect on,” he said after a member of the audience asked him what reading Herman Melville had taught him about the modern economy. “When I think about capital and labor, my first thought is of a mathematical equation: output is a function of how much capital there is and how much labor there is. I could have gone a long time, maybe forever, without thinking about how the capital makes the labor feel if I hadn’t had the experience of reading Melville. That’s why I found it to be a stimulating and useful experience.”
Summers commented on five modern economic themes—inequality, globalization, gender, the decline of manufacturing (and the increasing role of finance and lawyers), and the effect of capital on the human experience—as he saw them in Melville’s “The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids,” a short story that combines a nineteenth-century sketch of London’s legal industry and that of a New England paper mill.
Summers said that his experience analyzing Melville probably wouldn’t change the way he approaches economic problems—which, he noted, “achieves substantial analytical clarity at the expense of much textured understanding”—but it might add valuable nuance to his thinking.
“What I learned from thinking about ‘The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids’ was that there was a great deal that one would be led to think about by encountering that degree of texture,” he said. “Perhaps if we in economics were reciprocal in our approach to the humanities, we would be a bit more humble in our judgments, wide in our conception, and wise in our policies.”