Why Do So Many Judges Cite Jane Austen in Legal Decisions? | Hacker News Reader

Why Do So Many Judges Cite Jane Austen in Legal Decisions?

electricliterature.com

57 pointspepys14 comments

"So Many" == "27 times in American legal decision"

And half of these 27 'don’t engage with her work beyond the first line of Pride and Prejudice: "It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of good fortune must be in want of a wife."'

And from some of the examples given, the author includes cases that merely use the phrase "It is a truth universally acknowledged..." followed by whatever the judge is arguing.

So in fact very few judges have used a phrase that is now very much within common usage in English, and which has obvious appeal in legal arguments.

The article then rambles on about Austen and gender and law with no apparent point, argument, or goal.

Nice idea, but looks like the data didn't back up the point the author wanted to make so they just dumped the words out anyway.

You sewed it up! Excellent comment.

Statbait blogging is so irritating, and I see it all the time, where some seemingly interesting observation is twisted by someone's pet data mining project to support a crappy blog article.

> So in fact very few judges have used a phrase that is now very much within common usage in English, and which has obvious appeal in legal arguments.

Actually, it appears that they only counted uses of the phrase that were footnoted with a reference to the Austen text.

But I agree with your overall point about the article.

> Since the first published citation to Emma in 1978, Jane Austen’s works have been invoked 27 times in American legal decisions, including references to Mansfield Park, Northanger Abbey, and, of course, Pride and Prejudice.

Please add (<=27 judges) to the title.

The article was neat, but the headline is clickbait.

Betteridge's Law for the new generation: If a headline asks "Why Do...?" The answer is "They Don't."

Or "if question mark, assume clickbait".

If the title is a question the answer is usually no. If the answer was yes there'd be no need to formulate it as a question.

Jane Austen shows up in many scholarly discussions about morality and ethics; after all, legal discussions in many cases appeal to morality.

MacIntyre discusses about Jane Austen in his book "After Virtue"

The works of the philosopher J. Austin, author of _How to Do Things With Words_[1] (and the wonderfully titled _Sense and Sensibilia_[2]), seem eminently more relevant to law, and I hope are cited as well.

Austin writes about “performative utterances”[3] such as “I promise I will give you a dollar” and “I pronounce you man and wife”, which by their utterance become true.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._L._Austin#How_to_Do_Things_...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sense_and_Sensibilia_(Austin)

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performative_utterance

This is from the section of Edward Said's "Culture and Imperialism and Jane Austen, and feels, in some sense, like a helpful clue about the value of Austen's work to recent US legal culture.

"As in Austen's other novels, the central group that finally emerges with marriage and property "ordained" is not based exclusively upon blood. Her novel enacts the disaffiliation (in the literal sense) of some members of a family, and the affiliation between others and one or two chosen and tested outsiders: in other words, blood relationships are not enough to a sure continuity, hierarchy, authority, both and international."

The full section from the book is here: http://oldemc.english.ucsb.edu/emc-courses/JaneAusten-2011/A...

What is with the editorial meme of putting direct quotes of the article you're reading in line with the text of the article?

I've seen this across media. It almost makes sense to me in print (e.g. a magazine), because you can see the whole of the article at once, spread across the pages.

These quotes are often spread out to, I guess, break the flow of rendered/printed paragraphs.

In web content it seems a bit meaningless to me. This article is particularly terrible, as the quotes immediately follow the article text they are quoting.

In print media this made sense because you saw the entire article and these quotes would be picked out. Then upon reading the article you then read the quotes in context. On the web they usually appear directly before or after the sentence and make no sense to include. Especially when you take into account mobile users where there is usually no space between these quotes appearing and their use in the article.

I suppose Dickens especially his 'Bleak House', is frequently quoted by Courts, atleast in most of the Commonwealth.

Far more Judges quote Cicero and other classical authors I bet

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