The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 19.0322 Thursday, 29 May 2008
From: Larry Weiss <
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Date: Wednesday, 28 May 2008 12:49:47 -0400
Subject: Hard Cases
Suggested by SHK 19.0318 SHAKSPER Roundtable: Shakespeare's Intentions
[Editor's Note: As I announced, Cary and I are experimenting this week with the
new Roundtable (RT) format -- messages will be sent out as they arrive and a
digest will be sent out at the end of the week that includes everything from the
week -- invited essays, guest moderator's commentary, and discussions. As we
have been proceeding, we have discovered matters that we had not anticipated. We
wanted to distinguish between Roundtable (RT) discussions and regular traffic on
the list, and we wanted in the RTs to encourage critical engagement with the
issues of the topic but discourage having less focused comments. Having a RT
digest once per week was intended to address this issue; however, we were also
concerned that the once-a-week digest format might be inhibiting discussion. So
our dilemma is to try to find a "middle way" between the two, a way that,
nevertheless, preserves the distinction between RT and regular conversations on
SHAKSPER. Larry Weiss's submission below forced us to engage this dilemma. The
comments are interesting and are indeed suggested by what had been written;
however, comments are only marginally related to the topic of intentions. We
wrote to Larry Weiss; and, as it turns out, he shared our concern. We have
decided to change the subject so that the submission that, although suggested by
the Roundtable, would appear as a "regular" SHAKSPER offering suitable for
continuation as a thread on its own but apart from the more directly focused RT
thread on intentions. -Hardy Cook]
>we argue most of the time about what the lawyers call
>the "hard cases" that make for poor law and we ignore
>the very large body of agreement that makes interesting
>disagreement possible in the first place.
Actually, the word "hard" in this cliche does not mean "difficult"; it means
"causing hardship." The idea is that when judges are faced with the alternative
of following established law or altering it to avoid inflicting a hardship, they
may well commit an error. Apropos of the "intention" discussion, this notion is
what Portia *seems to mean* when she tells the Duke not to "wrest the law to
[his] authority | To do a great right do a little wrong" as "'Twill be recorded
for a precedent | And many an error, by the same example, | Will rush into the
state."
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Hardy M. Cook,
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