Reviewed by:

• Loving Justice: Legal Emotions in William Blackstone’s England by Kathryn D. Temple
• Mark Canuel (bio)

To say that Kathryn D. Temple’s new book fills a gap in literary scholarship would be a massive understatement. Over hundreds of years, William Blackstone, author of the four-volume Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–70), touched authors’ imaginations throughout Europe and the US, and the Commentaries has been a key text for any scholar who has wanted to say anything about marriage, property relations, punishment, or any other aspect of the law from the eighteenth century onwards. Many have depended on his characterizations of legal history to summarize centuries of legal practice even before Blackstone’s publication. Temple generously credits others like Daniel Boorstin who have written on the Commentaries with “humanities-oriented” approaches, but hers is the only full-length study of Blackstone that fully accounts for his importance in literature from the gothic novel to To Kill a Mockingbird (1960), and it is the only study that approaches Blackstone’s work with the literary sensibility and theoretical sophistication that it truly deserves.

Temple argues that Blackstone sought to ensconce idealized versions of common law within the balance and rationality of his own ambitious Commentaries. Rather than merely dismiss Blackstone’s ambitions as a charming relic from legal history, she shows his limitations as well as his insights—insights which she deftly weaves into a new juridical perspective by her book’s end. In Blackstone’s view, as Temple explains in her introduction, “the common law was a chaotic mess of inexplicably conflicting written case reports and precedents, half-remembered practices, and adages” (2). Jurists depended on compendia by a range of authors such as Matthew Hale and Thomas Wood, but these were widely regarded as incomplete. Blackstone’s Commentaries is in one sense remarkable for its ambitious attempt to comprehend every topic with a sense of enlightened and learned accomplishment. But it is in another sense remarkable, Temple argues, for inflecting the law with a sense of aesthetic and emotional intensity. Drawing on his youthful poem “The Lawyer’s Farewell to His Muse” to make her case, she shows how Blackstone from an early age acknowledged the emotional complexity behind the law and, by giving it order, provided “harmonic justice” for it (8). In contrast to the “loose revelry and riot” (12) of contemporary law practice, Blackstone sought justice in a serene “balance” between tradition and change, precedent and contingency (14). [End Page 483]

Temple’s methods here are “curatorial,” a methodology that demands its own sense of balance (18). While appreciating Blackstone’s ambitions, she also provides a sceptical perspective on the enlightened confidence of the author’s claims to rationality. She attends to issues of “form,” furthermore, while also connecting purposeful design to the world of human emotion (19). This method proves remarkably productive in the first chapter’s framing by Wilkie Collins’s novel Armadale (1864–66): as Neelie and Allan contemplate elopement, they consult Blackstone only to find that their marriage would have no legal standing without “consent of the father” (28). Collins’s lovers find themselves in a predicament in which the “desire” for legal sanction ends in disappointment and even “disgust” at the “hyper-rationality of the law” (31). The desire/disgust dyad leads Temple back to “The Lawyer’s Farewell,” showing how Blackstone’s own attitudes waver between attraction and repulsion: justice, personified as an Orientalized “Eastern Queen,” is both an alluring object of desire and a forbidding source of tyrannical authority (35).

Chapter 2 returns to the poem, specifically to its imagery of burial and loss, demonstrating how melancholy structures Blackstone’s entire account of property law. The logic of melancholy—which centres on the incorporation of a lost object of desire—illuminates Blackstone’s view of the lost harmony between rulers and subjects in ancient property relationships. Modern property law, with its complex and bewildering code governing ownership and inheritance, buries a “heroic, communal past” with “vulnerable bodies,” which are dead but never...

审核人：

• 慈爱的正义：威廉·布莱克斯通的英格兰法律情感，凯瑟琳·邓普（Kathryn D. Temple）
• 马克·坎努埃尔（生物）

要说凯瑟琳·邓普（Kathryn D. Temple）的新书填补了文学学术的空白，那就太轻描淡写了。数百年来，威廉·布莱克斯通（William Blackstone ）（《英格兰法律》四卷本）（1765–70）的作者触动了整个欧洲和美国的作者的想像力，对于任何想找学者的学者来说，这些评论都是关键文章。从18世纪开始，就婚姻，财产关系，惩罚或法律的任何其他方面讲任何话。许多人甚至在黑石集团出版之前，都依靠他对法律历史的刻画来总结几个世纪的法律实践。Temple慷慨地赞扬其他人，例如在《评论》上写过文章的Daniel Boorstin她采用“以人为本”的方法，但她是黑石大学的唯一一部全长研究，充分说明了他在从哥特式小说到《杀死一只知更鸟》（1960年）在文学中的重要性，并且是唯一研究黑石大学工作的研究具有真正应得的文学敏感性和理论技巧。

坦普（Temple）认为，黑石（Blackstone）试图在他自己雄心勃勃的评论的平衡与合理范围内，使理想化的普通法文本更加完整。她不仅显示黑石的雄心壮志是法律史上的迷人遗物，而且还展示了黑石的局限性以及他的见解-她的见解在书末已巧妙地编织成新的法律观点。在布莱克斯通看来，正如邓普尔在导言中所解释的那样，“普通法是混乱的混乱状态，书面案件报告和判例，前所未闻的惯例和格言格格不入地相互矛盾”（2）。法学家依赖马修·黑尔（Matthew Hale）和托马斯·伍德（Thomas Wood）等众多学者的纲要，但这些人被普遍认为是不完整的。黑石的评论从某种意义上说，它以雄心勃勃的尝试以开明和博学的成就感来理解每个主题而著称。坦普尔认为，从另一种意义上来说，这是非凡的，因为它以一种审美和情感上的力量来歪曲法律。她用他年轻的诗作《律师告别缪斯》作证，展示了黑石从小就如何承认法律背后的情感复杂性，并通过下达命令来为其提供“和谐正义”（8） 。与当代法律实践中的“散漫狂欢”（12）相反，黑石集团在传统与变革，先例与偶然性之间的宁静“平衡”中寻求正义（14）。[结束页483]

坦普尔的方法在这里是“策展的”，一种需要自身平衡感的方法（18）。在赞赏黑石集团的雄心壮志的同时，她还对作者对合理性主张的开明信心持怀疑态度。她还关注“形式”问题，同时还将有目的的设计与人类情感世界联系起来（19）。威尔基·柯林斯（Wilkie Collins）的小说《阿玛代尔》（Armadale）在第一章的框架中证明了这种方法的生产力。（1864–66）：当Neelie和Allan打算私奔时，他们咨询黑石集团，只是发现如果没有“父亲的同意”，他们的婚姻就没有合法地位（28）。柯林斯的恋人陷入困境，对法律制裁的“渴望”以对“法律的超理性”的失望甚至是“厌恶”结束（31）。欲望/厌恶的二分法使坦普尔回到“律师的告别”，这表明黑石自己的态度在吸引和排斥之间摇摆不定：正义，化身为东方化的“东方女王”，既是欲望的诱人对象，又是暴政的可怕来源。权限（35）。

第2章重述了这首诗，特别是对它的丧葬和遗失的意象，展示了忧郁症如何构成黑石整个财产法的解释。忧郁的逻辑（集中于遗失的欲望对象的结合）阐明了布莱克斯通关于古代财产关系中统治者与主体之间失落和谐的观点。现代财产法以其复杂而令人困惑的法规来控制所有权和继承权，将“英雄的，公共的过去”与“脆弱的尸体”联系在一起，这些尸体已经死了，但永远不会...