Hostname: page-component-7479d7b7d-t6hkb Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-07-10T04:43:41.398Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Imagining the Law of the Father: Loss, Dread, and Mourning in The Sweet Hereafter

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Austin Sarat
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

This essay takes the theme of the 1999 annual meeting of the Law and Society Association, “The Legal Imagination: Taking on Cultural Studies,” as an occasion for trying to promote an engagement between sociological studies and cultural studies. It argues that mass mediated images are as powerful and pervasive as other social forces with which sociological studies is already engaged and that the time has come to move from the study of law on the books and in action to law in the image. This argument is developed by analyzing the significance of the ubiquitous presence of tropes of fatherhood in popular cultural iconography about law. Drawing on psychoanalysis, gender theory, and film studies, this essay presents a close reading of a single film, The Sweet Hereafter. This film exemplifies the ways in which fatherhood becomes one of the key terms through which law is mythologized and through which fantasies and anxieties about law are expressed. Exploring the imagination of law in and through mass medicated images, like those contained in The Sweet Hereafter, is an important and engaging new frontier for sociolegal studies.

Type
Presidential Address
Information
Law & Society Review , Volume 34 , Issue 1 , 2000 , pp. 3 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © 2000 by the Law and Society Association

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

Footnotes

This is an expanded version of the Presidential Address delivered on Saturday, May 29, 1999, at the Law and Society Association annual meeting in Chicago, Illinois. I am grateful to Stephanie Sandler, Amrita Basu, Roger Berkowitz, Cathy Ciepiela, Marianne Constable, Lawrence Douglas, Thomas Dumm, Patricia Ewick, William Felstiner, Peter Fitzpatrick, Nasser Hussain, Carrie Menkel-Meadow, Sally Merry, Andy Parker, Carol Sanger, Stuart Scheingold, Kim Townsend, and Martha Umphrey for their generous reactions to the Presidential Address and/or for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. I am also grateful for opportunities to present this paper to the Australian Law and Literature Conference, at Cornell Law School, and at the Clason Speaker Series at Western New England School of Law.

References

References

Althusser, Louis (1971) “Freud and Lacan,” in B. Brewster, trans, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: Monthly Review Press.Google Scholar
Appadurai, Arjun (1991) “Global Ethnoscapes: Notes and Queries for a Transnational Anthropology,” in Fox, R., ed., Recapturing Anthropology. Sante Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.Google Scholar
Bandes, Susan (1990) “The Negative Constitution: A Critique,” 88 Michigan Law Rev., 2271–2347.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Banks, Russell (1991) The Sweet Hereafter. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland (1981) Richard Howard, trans., Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, New York: Hill & Wang.Google Scholar
Belkin, Lisa (1989) “19 Texas Students Die When Bus Plunges Into Water,” New York Times, 22 Sept., p. A–12.Google Scholar
Bennet, Tony (1998) “Cultural Studies: A Reluctant Discipline,” 12 Cultural Studies 528–545.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Benson, Leonard (1968) Fatherhood: A Sociological Perspective. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Berlant, Lauren (1998) “Collegiality, Crisis, and Cultural Studies,” Profession 1998 105–116.Google Scholar
Bialik, Hayim (1981) “The Pogrom in Kishinev,” in T.Carmi, ed., The Penguin Book of Hebrew Verse. New York: Penguin Books.Google Scholar
Black, Donald (1989) Sociological Justice. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Bodoff, Lippman (1993) “The Real Test of the Akedah: Blind Obedience Versus Moral Choice,” 42 Judaism 71–92.Google Scholar
Bronfren, Elisabeth (1993), “Risky Resemblances: On Repetition, Mourning, and Representation,” in Goodwin, S. Webster & Bronfen, E., eds., Death and Representation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Brooks, Peter (1998) “A Slightly Polemic Comment on Austin Sarat,” 10 Yale J. of Law & the Humanities 409–412.Google Scholar
Buyarin, Jonathan (1997) “Another Abraham: Jewishness and the Law of the Father,” 9 Yale J. of Law & the Humanities 345–394.Google Scholar
Caruth, Cathy (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Casper, Jonathan (1998) “Crossing Boundaries in Sociolegal Research,” in Sarat, A., Constable, M., Engel, D., Hans, V., & Lawrence, S., eds., Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research. Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Chase, Anthony (1986) “Toward a Legal Theory of Popular Culture,” 1986 Wisconsin Law Rev. 527–569.Google Scholar
Clover, Carol (1998) “Law and the Order of Popular Culture,” in Sarat, A. and Kearns, T., eds., Law in the Domains of Culture. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Cohan, Steven, & Hark, Ina Rae (1993) Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Cole, Susan (1985), The Absent One: Mourning Ritual, Tragedy, and the Performance of Ambivalence. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Coombe, Rosemary (1998) “Contingent Articulations: A Critical Cultural Studies of Law,” in Sarat, A. and Kearns, T., eds., Law in the Domain of Cultures. Ann Arbor: Univ.of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Cover, Robert (1986) “Violence and the Word,” 95 Yale Law J. 1601–1630.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Craft, Gretchen (1992), “The Persistence of Dread in Law and Literature,” 102 Yale Law Journal, 521–546.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cunningham, Frank (1986) “Sidney Lumet's Humanism: The Return of the Father in Twelve Angry Men,” 14 Literature/Film Quart., 112–121.Google Scholar
de Lauretis, Teresa (1986) “Through the Looking-Glass,” in Rosen, P., ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Denvir, John (1996) Legal Reelism: Movies as Legal Texts. Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques (1995) David Wills, trans., The Gift of Death. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Derrida, Jacques (1996) “Adieu” 23 Critical Inquiry 1–10.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dumm, Thomas (1990) “Fear of Law,” 10 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 29–60.Google Scholar
Egoyen, Atom (1997) “Recovery” 7 Sight & Sound 20–23.Google Scholar
Emerson, Ralph Waldo (1983) “Experience,” in Essays & Lectures. New York: Library of America.Google Scholar
Felstiner, William, Abel, Richard, & Sarat, Austin (1980-81) “The Emergence and Transformation of Disputes: Naming, Blaming, and Claiming,” 15 Law & Society Rev., 631–654.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fineman, Martha (1999) “Law of the Father,” manuscript. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Law School.Google Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Peter (1992) The Mythology of Modern Law. London: Routledge.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Fitzpatrick, Peter (1997) “In the Exigency of His Longing': Freud's Discovery of Law and Fiction in Totem and Taboo” 32 New Formations 143–156.Google Scholar
Flitterman-Lewis, Sandy (1992) “Psychoanalysis, Film, and Television,” in Allen, R., ed., Channels of Discourse: Reassembled: Television and Contemporary Criticism. Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.Google Scholar
Frank, Jerome (1930) Law and The Modern Mind. New York: Brentano.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1925), “Mourning and Melancholia,” in Joan Riviere, trans., Collected Papers, Vol. 4. London: Hogarth Press.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1950) Totem and Taboo. James Strachey, trans., New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1959) Inhibition, Symptoms, and Anxiety. Alix Strachey, trans., New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1965a) James Strachey, trans., The Interpretation of Dreams. New York: Avon.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1965b) James Strachey, trans., New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1975) Joan Riviere, trans., A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. New York: Pocket Books.Google Scholar
Freud, Sigmund (1977) James Strachey, trans., Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis. New York: Norton.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence (1985) “The Law and Society Movement,” 38 Stanford Law Rev. 763–780.Google Scholar
Friedman, Lawrence (1989) “Law, Lawyers, and Popular Culture,” 98 Yale Law J., 1579–1606.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gellman, Jerome (1998) “The Figure of Abraham in Hasidic Literature,” 98 Harvard Theological Rev. 279–300.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gerwitz, Paul (1996) “Victims and Voyeurs: Two Narrative Problems at the Criminal Trial,” in Brooks, P. & Gewirtz, P., eds., Law's Stories: Narrative and Rhetoric in the Law. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Getman, Julius (1988) “Voices,” 66 Texas Law Rev., 577–588.Google Scholar
Golden, Tim (1992) “Guatemala Indian Wins Nobel Peace Prize,” New York Times, 17 Oct., A-5.Google Scholar
Goldin, Judah (1969) “Introduction,” to Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial: On the Legends and Lore of the Command to Abraham to Offer Isaac as a Sacrifice: The Akedah. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Goodrich, Peter (1996) Oedipus Lex: Psychoanalysis, History, Law. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Goodrich, Peter (1997) “Maladies of the Legal Soul: Psychoanalysis and Interpretation in Law,” 54 Washington & Lee Law Rev. 1035–1074.Google Scholar
Gordon, Robert (1984) “Critical Legal Histories,” 36 Stanford Law Rev. 57–126.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol (1989) “Just in Time: Temporality and the Cultural Legitimation of Law,” 98 Yale Law J. 1631–1652.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Greenhouse, Carol, Yngvesson, Barbara, & Engel, David (1994) Law and Community in Three American Towns. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Griswold, Robert (1993) Fatherhood in America: A History. New York: Basic Books.Google Scholar
Grossberg, Lawrence (1996) “Identity and Cultural Studies: Is That All There Is?” in Hall, S. & DuGay, P., eds., Questions of Cultural Identity. London: Sage.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart (1980) “Cultural Studies and the Centre,” in Hall, S., Hobson, D., & Lowe, A., eds., Culture, Media, Language. London: Hutchinson.Google Scholar
Hall, Stuart et al. (1978) Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State, and Law and Order. New York: Holmes & Meier.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hartman, Geoffrey (1996) “The Blind Side of the Akedah,” 16 Raritan 28–39.Google Scholar
Heath, Stephen (1986) “Narrative Space,” in Rosen, P., ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Johnson, Richard (1986/87) “What Is Cultural Studies Anyway?” Social Text 16–54.Google Scholar
Kafka, Franz (1958) Parables and Paradoxes. New York: Schocken Books.Google Scholar
Kennedy, J. Michael (1990) “Grief, Greed, and the Lawyers: Aftermath,” Los Angeles Times, May 29, E–1.Google Scholar
Kiss, Elizabeth (1995) “Is Nationalism Compatible with Human Rights?: Reflections on East-Central Europe,” in Sarat, A. & Kearns, T., eds., Identities, Politics, and Rights. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Klawans, Stuart (1997) “The Sweet Hereafter,” The Nation, 8 Dec, 35–36.Google Scholar
Levenson, Jon (1998) “Abusing Abraham: Traditions, Religious Histories, Modern Misinterpretations,” 47 Judaism 259–277.Google Scholar
Locke, John (1946) “Of Paternal Power,” in Gough, J.W., ed., Second Treatise of Civil Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.Google Scholar
Lyons, Donald (1998) “The Long Goodbye: Fathers and Sons and American Cinema,” 34 Film Comment 54–61.Google Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart (1987) “Images of Law in Everyday Life: The Lessons of School, Entertainment, and Spectator Sports,” 21 Law & Society Rev. 185–218.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Macaulay, Stewart (1989) “Popular Legal Culture: An Introduction,” 98 Yale Law J. 1545–1559.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Masson, Jeffrey (1992) The Assault on Truth: Freud's Suppression of the Seduction Theory. New York: Harper Perennial.Google Scholar
May, Martha (1997) “From Cads to Dads: The Unwed Father in American Films,” 25 J. of Popular Film and Television 2–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
McKee, Lorna, & O'Brien, Margaret, eds. (1982) The Father Figure. London: Tavistock Publications.Google Scholar
Metz, Christian (1982) The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and the Cinema. Indianapolis: Indiana Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mezey, Naomi (1994) “Legal Radicals in Madonna's Closet: The Influence of Identity Politics, Popular Culture, and a New Generation on Critical Legal Studies,” 46 Stanford Law Rev. 1835–1861.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Minow, Martha (1990) “Words and the Door to the Land of Change: Law, Language, and Family Violence,” 43 Vanderbilt Law Rev. 1665–1699.Google Scholar
Minow, Martha (1998) Between Vengeance and Forgiveness: Facing History after Genocide and Mass Violence. Boston: Beacon Press.Google Scholar
Morley, David (1998) “So-Called Cultural Studies: Dead Ends and Reinvented Wheels,” 12 Cultural Studies 476–497.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Morrison, Toni (1987) Beloved. New York: Plume.Google Scholar
Morson, Saul (1994) Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Mosher, Howard (1991) “The Lost Children.” The Washington Post, 8 Sept. 1991, Book World, X3.Google Scholar
Mulvey, Laura (1986) “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Rosen, P., ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. New York: Columbia Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Penley, Constance, & Willis, Sharon, eds. (1993) Male Trouble. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Phillips, Adam (1995) Terrors and Experts. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Rattigan, Neil, & McManus, Thomas (1992) “Fathers, Sons, and Brothers: Patriarchy and Guilt in 1980s American Cinema,” 20 J. of Popular Film and Television 15–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rhode, Deborah (1999) “A Bad Press on Bad Lawyers: the Media Sees Research, Research Sees the Media,” in Ewick, P., Kagan, R., & Sarat, A., eds., Social Science, Social Policy and the Law. New York: Russell Sage.Google Scholar
Ronell, Avital (1989) The Telephone Book: Technology, Schizophrenia, Electronic Speech. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press.Google Scholar
Rose, Gillian (1996) Mourning Becomes the Law: Philosophy and Representation. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Russell, Catherine (1995) Narrative Mortality: Death, Closure, and New Wave Cinemas. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin (1985) “Legal Effectiveness and Social Studies of Law,” 9 Legal Studies Forum 23–32.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Berkowitz, Roger (1994) “Disorderly Differences: Recognition, Accommodation, and American Law,” 6 Yale J. of Law & the Humanities 285–316.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, Constable, Marianne, Engel, David, Hans, Valerie, & Lawrence, Susan (1998) Crossing Boundaries: Traditions and Transformations in Law and Society Research. Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Felstiner, William (1989) “Lawyers and Legal Consciousness: Law Talk in the Divorce Lawyer's Office,” 98 Yale Law J. 1663–1688.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Felstiner, William (1995) Divorce Lawyers and Their Clients: Power and Meaning in the Legal Process. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Kearns, Thomas (1991) “A Journey Through Forgetting: Toward a Jurisprudence of Violence,” in Sarat, A. & Kearns, T., eds., The Fate of Law. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Kearns, Thomas (1993) “Making Peace with Violence,” in Sarat, A. & Kearns, T., eds., Law's Violence. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Sarat, Austin, & Silbey, Susan (1988) “The Pull of the Policy Audience,” 10 Law & Policy, 98–166.Google Scholar
Shelton, Emily (1995) “Through the Looking-Glass: The Child, Sexual Investigation, and Cinematic Self-Reflexivity,” manuscript. Amherst: Amherst College.Google Scholar
Sherwin, Richard (1996) “Picturing Justice: Images of Law and Lawyers in the Visual Media,” 30 Univ. of San Francisco Law Rev., 891–901.Google Scholar
Shklar, Judith (1990) The Faces of Injustice. New Haven: Yale Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Silbey, Susan, & Sarat, Austin (1987) “Critical Traditions in Law and Society Research,” 21 Law & Society Review, 165–174.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Silverman, Kaja (1990) “Historical Trauma and Male Subjectivity,” in Kaplan, E. A., ed., Psychoanalysis & Cinema. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Silverman, Kaja (1992) Male Subjectivity at the Margins. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Silverman, Kaja (1996) The Threshold of the Visible. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Sobchack, Vivian (1992) The Address of the Eye: A Phenomenology of Film Experience. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Soifer, Avi (1989) “Moral Ambition, Formalism, and the ‘Free World’ of DeShaney,” 57 George Washington Law Rev., 1513–1532.Google Scholar
Suleiman, Susan (1985) “Writing and Motherhood,” in Garner, S., Kahane, C., & Sprengnether, M., eds., The (M)other Tongue, Essays in Feminist Psychoanalytic Interpretation. Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press.Google Scholar
The Sweet Hereafter (1997) Produced by Camelia Friedberg and Atom Egoyan, directed by Atom Egoyan. 112 min. Alliance Communications. Motion picture.Google Scholar
Weber, Samuel (1996) “Mass Mediauris: or, Art, Aura, and Media in the Work of Walter Benjamin,” in Ferris, D., ed., Walter Benjamin: Theoretical Questions. Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Weisberg, Richard (1988) “Family Feud: A Response to Robert Weisberg on Law and Literature,” 1 Yale J. of Law & the Humanities 69–77.Google Scholar
Yalom, Irvin (1989) Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy. New York: HarperCollins.Google Scholar
Yngvesson, Barbara (1989) “Inventing Law in Local Settings: rethinking Popular Legal Culture,” 98 Yale Law J. 1689–1710.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Young, Alison (1997) “Murder in the Eyes of the Law,” 17 Studies in Law, Politics and Society 31–58.Google Scholar

Cases Cited

Lopez v. State of Texas, 846 S.W.2d 90 (1992).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Murillo v. Valley Coca-Cola Bottling, 895 S.W.2d 758 (1995).Google Scholar
Perez v. Kirk & Carrigan, 822 S.W.2d 261 (1991).Google Scholar
State of Texas v. Sandoval, 842 S.W.2d 782 (1992).Google Scholar
U.S. U.S: DeShaney v. Winnebago, 489 US 189 (1989).Google Scholar