An ineluctable minimum of natural law: François Gény, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and the limits of legal skepticism

During the first few decades of the twentieth century, legal theory on both sides of the Atlantic was characterized by a tremendous amount of skepticism toward the private law concepts of property and contract. In the United States and France, Oliver Wendell Holmes and François Gény led the charge with withering critiques of the abuse of deduction, exposing their forebears’ supposedly gapless system of private law rules for what it was, a house of cards built on the ideological foundations of laissez faire capitalism. The goal was to make the United States Constitution and the French civil code more responsive to the realities of industrialization. Unlike the other participants in this transatlantic critique, François Gény simultaneously insisted on the immutability of justice and social utility. His “ineluctable minimum of natural law” would guide judges and jurists toward the proper social ends, replacing deduction with teleology. The problem was that nearly all of Gény's contemporaries were perplexed by his conception of natural law, which lacked the substance of the natural rights tradition of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and the historicist impulse of the early twentieth. No one was more perplexed than Oliver Wendell Holmes, whose more thoroughgoing skepticism led him to see judicial restraint as the only solution to the abuse of deduction. The ultimate framework for this debate was World War I, in which both Holmes and Gény thought they had found vindication for their views. Events on the battlefield reaffirmed Gény's commitment to justice just as they reignited Holmes’ existential embrace of the unknown. In a sense, the limits of their skepticism would be forged in the trenches of the Great War.     

Oliver Cromwell and the Cambridge Elections of 1640

Oliver Cromwell's many biographers have been puzzled by his elections as MP for Cambridge in 1640. His connections with the town at this time were slight. Historians have, therefore, fallen back on his supposed opposition to the draining of the fens or, more recently, on possible aristocratic patronage. This article proposes a new theory, based on a rehabilitation of a very old source, James Heath's Flagellum, one of the earliest Cromwell biographies. Heath claimed that Cromwell had been elected with the support of a group of minor members of the corporation. Although very garbled, the Flagellum account probably records genuine details about the election and the men it identified as Cromwell's key supporters can be shown to have opposed the religious policies of the local bishop, Matthew Wren of Ely. Cromwell was probably elected as a critic of Wren.     

Bearing Witness: Hope for the Unseen

Beginning with an identification of the ethical and political ambivalence surrounding hope, this essay considers whether an analysis of the activity of bearing witness to truth could offer a theoretical framework for thinking about hope differently. Specifically it argues that hope can be taken as a discipline, or practice, one which is both required for, and enacted in, the act of bearing witness. Through a consideration of the process of bearing witness in Truth and Reconciliation Commissions responding to national and intergenerational trauma, the essay explores the way in which bearing witness is a fundamentally hopeful action in so far as it ceaselessly seeks to speak to the truth of an event while acknowledging the inability to ever fully capture that event in words.     

Golgi,Cajal and the Neuron Doctrine

Camillo Golgi and Santiago Ramón y Cajal shared the Nobel Prize in 1906 for their work on the histology of the nerve cell, but both held diametrically opposed views about the Neuron Doctrine which emphasizes the structural, functional and developmental singularity of the nerve cell. Golgi's reticularist views remained entrenched and his work on the nervous system did not venture greatly into new territories after its original flowering, which had greater impact than is now commonly credited. Cajal, by contrast, by the time he was awarded the Nobel Prize, was already breaking new ground with a new staining technique in the field of peripheral nerve regeneration, seeing the reconstruction of a severed nerve by sprouting from the proximal stump as another manifestation of the Neuron Doctrine. Paradoxically, identical studies were going on simultaneously in Golgi's laboratory in the hands of Aldo Perroncito, but the findings did not seem to influence Golgi's thinking on the Neuron Doctrine.     

Healing the nation: royalist visionaries,Cromwell, and the restoration of Charles II

ABSTRACT

The radical visionaries of the civil war era had several royalist counterparts, today often overlooked. This article examines the three most significant: John Sanders of Harborne, Walter Gostelo, and Arise Evans. God, they claimed, had directed them to press Cromwell to restore Charles II, perhaps through a marriage alliance. This alone could settle the nation, and it would usher in a millennial age of peace. Sanders combined support for the crown and Church with a remarkable call for the nailers of Birmingham to strike against their oppressive employers. His family responded to his visionary mission with deep hostility. Evans attracted far greater public interest; he and Gostelo were able to present their ideas to Cromwell in person, and Gostelo travelled to the exiled royal court. The visionaries’ message, if ultimately unacceptable, spoke to the concerns of many contemporaries anxious and uncertain about the future.     

A Response to the Conference

Abstract

The question discussed in this article is whether Christian theology should influence contemporary political debates. The topic is discussed through two practical case studies: (1) technological advances in genetic engineering and (2) the just war tradition and the use of force. In the first discussion, Dietrich Bonhoeffer's unfinished Ethics is employed to demonstrate the importance of substantial theological categories to resist a reductionist technological utilitarian discourse about the body. Intrinsic human dignity is essentially God-given. In the second, Aquinas and Augustine add theological complexity and substance to secular discussions of war and peace. Human caring is more than the protection of the sovereign state. A peace that is only the absence of war can disguise many harmful situations. In conclusion, theological discussion brings nuance, richness and depth to secular political debates so long as theologians go beyond simplistic contributions such as ‘God demands’ or ‘The Bible forbids’.     

The Case of the Case History: Detecting the Medical Report in Sherlock Holmes

Critics have examined both the influence of the medical case model and the newer laboratory sciences on Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes tales, but they have often overlooked key aspects of the stories' turn-of-the-century historical context. I argue that in response to the indefinite rewards offered by the up-and-coming laboratory sciences and the grandiose claims of many of those practicing these sciences, Conan Doyle chose to circle back to an earlier clinical method and to echo a type of case narrative that provides both closure and disclosure via post-mortem exam. Thus, Conan Doyle's stories, with their breakdown into Watsonian history and Holmesian summation, register the value of clinical procedures by using the established medical case study that ends in autopsy as a template. In his fictional echoing of the case culminating in post-mortem exam, Conan Doyle's Holmes stories draw attention to the accuracy of knowledge that only such cases can provide, and in doing so, Conan Doyle highlights the uncertainty inherent in both many Victorian medical practices and the unproven laboratory sciences of the day – an uncertainty, the tales suggest, that could only be remedied by accruing information through this particularly revealing type of case documentation. In the process, the Holmes tales reflect on the case's unique ability to narrate a type of resolution which cannot be otherwise represented. In its emphasis on making comprehensible that which defies mastery through other means lies the case's essential fit with literary narrative more generally – and narratives of detection like the Holmes stories, in particular.     

Scottish Representation in the Protectorate Parliaments: The Case of the Shires

The 30 MPs elected for Scotland in the Cromwellian parliaments of 1654, 1656 and 1659 have often been seen as government‐sponsored placemen, foisted on constituencies by the military. Some were Scottish collaborators, but most were English carpetbaggers. Restrictions on voter qualifications, designed to weed out suspected royalists, and opposition to English rule among the Scots, further contributed to what has been described as the antithesis of representation, a ‘hollow sham’. This article revisits the question of Scottish representation in this period through the analysis of the surviving indentures for the shire elections of 1656. These documents – of which 17 of the 20 survive – give the date of election, the name of the presiding officer (usually the sheriff) and details of principal electors, often with signatures and seals attached. Four constituencies are used as case studies: Peeblesshire and Selkirkshire, Ayrshire and Renfrewshire, Perthshire, and Fife and Kinross. Each constituency had a distinct response to Cromwellian rule and to the parliamentary elections, but general themes emerge: the restrictions on voters were totally ignored; direct interference by the English authorities was rare; and the elections were dominated by local political and religious disputes between the Scots themselves. This analysis further suggests that there was no unified Scottish interest at this time, that local differences overrode other considerations, and that in many cases, choosing an Englishman as MP could be the least controversial option, as well as that most likely to secure influence at Westminster.