Sharp’s Numbers

Yesterday afternoon, I opened an important old book and was carried back over ten years of memory.

When I say old, I mean the book was printed in 1772. The book is important because it was critical to the development of the modern anti-slavery movement.

I’m in the midst of preparing a series of videos that will tell the story of the legal systems of the world through the story of their books and manuscripts. Right now, I’m working on a video about Blackstone’s Commentaries, the great eighteenth-century survey of the English common law. So I went to visit Mike Widener, Rare Book Librarian at Yale Law School, which has the best collection of Blackstone anywhere.

As Mike and I were talking about Blackstone, he also showed me some treasures from his recent headline-making acquisition from the library of British barrister Anthony Taussig. One of them caught me off guard.

Maine Meets Maine

My new video is about an ancient institution. You can view it below, or you can watch it directly on YouTube by clicking here.

Tomorrow, I’ll be visiting the rare books room at Yale Law School, where my friend Mike Widener will be showing me some of his treasures, including the library’s collection of Blackstone—the subject of a future video. Stay tuned. And thanks for your comments and support.

Why International Law is Like Webster’s Third Dictionary (at least, for E. B. White)

United Nations Security Council Chamber

E. B. White disliked the name “the United Nations”—he thought it dishonest and phony. The structure of the institution, from its weak emergency force to the veto power of the Security Council, seemed to him to sell out the ideal of global unity. It offered a thin bill of fare whose underlying ingredient was the principle of national sovereignty.

“Some people, perhaps most people, think words are not really important,” he wrote in Points of My Compass, “but I am a word man and I attach the very highest importance to words. … The newspapers, with their sloppy proofreading, sometimes call the world organization the United Notions, sometimes the Untied Nations. Neither of these typos would make a serviceable title, but curiously enough, both are pat.”

Because White was at bottom “a word man,” I’d like to conclude this thread by suggesting how his legal vision is implicated in The Elements of Style—a book that many readers of this blog will know more intimately than all his other works. White’s views about English prose, it turns out, also register his views about world federalism.

In Stuart Little, the book’s hero draws a distinction between two proposed laws: “Don’t eat mushrooms, they might be toadstools” and “Nix on swiping anything.” The first, says the young mouse, acting as Chairman of the World, is merely “advice.” The second is a “good law.” Why? Foremost among its qualities, it is enforceable. In its propositional clarity, it can be backed up with punishment and power—which Stuart demonstrates by encouraging Harry Jamieson to steal Katharine Stableford’s scented pillow.

White believed that the standards for international conduct developed by the United Nations were nothing more than a litany of recommendations not to eat mushrooms—and that they probably could never be anything more than that. The institution’s rules, after all, were developed through mere diplomacy. “To speak as though we had law,” he protested in The Wild Flag, “when what we’ve got is treaties and pacts, to use the world ‘law’ for non-law, is to lessen our chances of ever getting law among peoples.”

To vindicate the equality of mankind, to protect “the ‘I’ in man which Hitler has set out to destroy,” to protect all the world’s peoples—including, in Stuart Little, rats—treaties and pacts were not enough. “Government is the thing,” White argued. “Law is the thing. Not brotherhood, not international co-operation ….” What was needed were objective, inflexible, normative rules of conduct whose meaning everyone could apprehend.

Charlotte the Spider, Supreme Court Justice

Very soon, my wife and I will be spending a few days in Maine. We’re going there for a wedding, and rather than spend money on a hotel, we’re going to camp. We’re looking forward to putting on our formal wear beneath the pine trees. And I’m looking forward to visiting the state again after a long absence. The last time I was in Maine, I was in college:

Isn’t that some lobster? I believe we cooked that lobster right where we stood, on the beach, in a tin bucket.

Our impending trip makes me feel especially close to E. B. White, whose views about world government I’ve been considering in a recent thread. They also put me in mind of Justice William O. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court. I don’t think that the two ever met—at least, there are no letters between them in the E. B. White Collection at Cornell or the Justice Douglas papers at the Library of Congress. But they share a great deal in common.

Most obviously, they share a love of Maine. White spent much of his life there, at his farm in North Brooklin, and some of his greatest essays, such as “Once More to the Lake,” evoke the beauties of its distinctive, unspoiled landscape. I especially like the collection The Points of My Compass, which also contains some of White’s writings on international law. As for Justice Douglas, as I noted in an October post, he was a nature writer of real skill—and one of his greatest sources of inspiration was Mount Katahdin. That’s the highest peak in Maine and, for hikers traveling north, the end of the 2,200-mile Appalachian Trail (which Justice Douglas also completed).

“Katahdin has been like a haunting melody since the day in the late twenties when I first saw it against a buttermilk sky,” he wrote in My Wilderness. “For some years I explored the dark woods and marshy lakes at its feet, and climbed its rough points. Then came a long period of absence. But the pull of Katahdin, like that of an old love, was always strong. The memories of it were especially bright every May, when the ice went out and the squaretails started jumping—every June, when the salmon-fly hatch was on. Fiddlehead ferns—partridgeberries—alpine azalea with tiny cerise flowers … all of these—and more—were Katahdin.”

From Charlotte’s Web to Star Trek: Animals and Midcentury Legal Internationalism

Why is it significant that Stuart Little is a mouse—I mean, why is it significant from the perspective of American legal history? What does Justice William O. Douglas of the U.S. Supreme Court have to do with Wilbur, the “radiant” and “humble” pig of Charlotte’s Web? What links a barnyard in North Brooklin, Maine and the Federation Council in the television series “Star Trek”? These are some of the questions I’d like to think about in this fifth post in a continuing thread about E. B. White and international law—or, to put it another way, about the popular liberal legal imagination at midcentury.

To my mind, the opening line of Charlotte’s Web is a model of how to begin a story: “‘Where’s Papa going with that ax?’” Where Papa is going, to the distress of young Fern, is to kill the runt of a new litter of pigs. The line is potent mixture of action, threat, and conflicted loyalty, and it came to White only after many revisions. One of his earliest drafts begins this way: “A barn can have a horse in it, and a barn can have a cow in it, and a barn can have hens scratching in the chaff and swallows flying in and out through the door—but if a barn hasn’t got a pig in it, it is hardly worth talking about. I am very glad to say that Mr. Zuckerman’s barn had a pig in it, and therefore I feel free to talk about it as much as I want to.” Compare the two sentences and you have a lesson in great editing.

What the first sentence also does is instantly establish empathy with animals. In this case, the reader’s heart goes out to the pig which—whom—Fern soon calls Wilbur. Much of White’s writing gives animals an unassuming, gentle subjectivity. The first chapter of Charlotte’s Web ends with Fern naming Wilbur; the final chapter concludes with Wilbur naming Charlotte’s children (Joy, Aranea, and Nellie). One  aspect of White’s literary brilliance was to be able to create this subjectivity without being at all patronizing. Wilbur, Charlotte, Templeton (the rat), the geese, all become our moral equals without fuss. Stuart is an ordinary member of the Little family—part of the pleasure of the tale derives from how everyone takes for granted that he’s a mouse.

White grew up taking care of farm animals at his family’s home in Mount Vernon, New York. He spent time amidst them each summer when his family retreated to Maine. And he surrounded himself with them—sheep, chickens, pigs, geese—when he and his wife, Katharine, purchased a house and barn near North Brooklin (the barn was the inspiration for Charlotte’s Web). Not surprisingly, then, animals populated his prose, for both children and adults. Here’s a characteristic passage of his writing, from the introduction to One Man’s Meat:

“One Law”: An Anthem for World Federalism

In my previous post, I discussed how E. B. White’s Stuart Little put the ideas of world federalist Emery Reves into literary form. Next time, I’ll talk more generally about how White’s view of international law is implicated in his depiction of nature and his approach to English prose style. Today, I’d like to take a brief detour.

You may not know the name Marvin Hamlisch, but you more than likely have heard his music, especially if you enjoy Hollywood or Broadway. He wrote some of the greatest scores for both, from “The Sting” to “A Chorus Line.” As one might have expected of someone who enrolled in The Julliard School at the age of seven, he was one of an exceedingly small group of musicians to have won an Emmy, a Grammy, and Oscar, and a Tony—such paragons of popular song are known as EGOTs—and he was one of only two musicians to have won all those awards and a Pulitzer. Here is the theme he wrote for the James Bond film “The Spy Who Loved Me”—followed by a recent performance of the song by Radiohead, for readers who may not want to be reminded of the 1970s.

And Hamlisch didn’t just write hits. If you want to get a sense of how important his background music was to the power of American film, try imagining this sequence from Woody Allen’s “Take the Money and Run,” about the hapless bank robber Virgil Starkwell, without Hamlisch’s score:

Hamlisch passed away just ten months ago, at the age of 68.

Stuart Little and World Federalism: Part III

Not many people today have heard of Emery Reves. In the 1940s, however, he was well known as an intellectual leader in the movement for global government. One of the few traces of his past fame in the United States can be found in Dallas. In 1948, the Hungarian-born Reves took up with socialite and fashion model Wendy Russell, a Texan, whom he eventually married. She encouraged her husband’s art collecting, and today the Dallas Museum of Art houses the outstanding Wendy and Emery Reves Collection of impressionist and post-impressionist painting and European decorative arts. Here’s a photo of the couple that I especially like, drawn from the DMA website (call the image “high and low”?). It’s followed by a picture of Reves in about 1945, when he was at the height of his influence on advocates for world federalism—including the author of Stuart Little, about whom I wrote in yesterday’s post.

Source: dma.mobi via Dallas Museum on Pinterest

Source: dma.mobi via Dallas Museum on Pinterest

In the United States, its sympathizers included Wendell Willkie, the 1940 Republican nominee for president, who after a stint as a global ambassador for the Roosevelt administration authored the bestselling book One World (1943). One can easily understand the movement’s appeal, especially at the time. Millions of people had just perished on the altar of nationalism, and in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, nations began to stockpile weapons capable of reducing most of human life to radioactive ash.

The Story Continues: Stuart Little & International Law

As I was saying in yesterday’s post, when I read “The Schoolroom” chapter E. B. White’s Stuart Little I was surprised—and I learned something about the author I hadn’t known: he had a passionate interest in international law.

The pivotal exchange of the chapter begins when Stuart, having clarified “what’s important,” asks his students to suggest “good laws for the world.” In a madcap exchange, the students make five suggestions, of which Stuart approves of only two:

1) Albert Fernstrom begins by suggesting the following: “Don’t eat mushrooms, they might be toadstools.” Stuart describes this as “very good advice,” but he counsels that “advice and law are not the same.” Law, explains Stuart, is “extremely solemn.”

2) John Podowski is next: “Nix on swiping anything,” intones John—solemnly. “Very good,” replies Stuart. “Good law.”

3) Anthony Brendisi (I love all these names, this ethnic jumble) proposes: “Never poison anything but rats.” Stuart objects: “That’s no good. It’s unfair to rats. A law has to be fair to everybody.” Although rats are objectionable, and though Stuart is himself a mouse, he explains that, as Chairman of the World, he “has to see all sides to a problem.”

4) Agnes Beretska raises her hand to recommend that “there ought to be a law against fighting.” Stuart dismisses this as impractical, because “men like to fight,” but he observes “you’re getting warm.”

5) Mildred Hoffenstein makes the final suggestion: “absolutely no being mean.” Although Stuart isn’t sure whether the law will work—as Herbert Prendergast notes, “some people are just naturally mean”—he declares “it’s a good law, and we’ll give it a try.”

And try they do. An experiment follows.

Hegel and Lacan Meet The Rule of the Clan

Prof. Jeanne L. Schroeder of Cardozo Law School has written a fine, thoughtful, extended (and complimentary) review of The Rule of the Clan in which she reads my book through the framework of Hegelian philosophy and the psychoanalytic theory of French post-structuralist Jacques Lacan. She concludes: “In his defense of the classical liberal ideal of individual rights and equality, Weiner implicitly rejects one of liberalism’s founding propositions: a vision of the free individual in the state of nature. Weiner’s thesis is more consistent with the speculative tradition of Continental theory than with American liberalism.”

The link provided is to an abstract of Prof. Schroeder’s review on the Social Science Research Network (SSRN), where you can download her full, twenty-seven-page text. I understand that Prof. Schoeder will be sending her essay to law reviews in the upcoming submission cycle. I’m exceptionally gratified by the review, and very moved that my book inspired such deep intellectual engagement by a colleague.

In the meantime, this must be a good week for Francophilia, because “The Call of the Clan,” my recent essay for Foreign Policy, has just been published in French translation for Salte.fr as “De l’union européenne à l’Afghanistan … L’appel du clan,” in a translation by Peggy Sastre. Merci beaucoup, amis et compatriotes!

 

 

Stuart Little and International Law

For the past few weeks, I have been reading E. B. White. I began with Stuart Little, and this post is about what a brave, aspiring, flawed little mouse has to say about international law. It’s also about Justice William O. Douglas, talking animals, literary style, the composer Marvin Hamlisch, and the State of Maine. (Actually, given all those subjects, this will be a series of posts, which I’ll later collect together into a single text.)

I should begin by letting on that a great deal has happened around my house recently, at least from one point of view, and it’s created a framework of preoccupation for my reading. It all started with the peas. Each spring, my wife and I plant a vegetable garden from seed, and this year the alternating rain and heat we’ve experienced in Connecticut has meant that things are shaping up nicely in the photosynthesis department. After an early sprout, our peas twisted rapidly up the dry branches we use as climbing poles, and now scores of delicate tendrils are waving in the breeze, seeking an upward purchase amidst a profusion of purple flowers and waxy yellow pods. In the meantime, our salad greens are leaning every which way in a carpet of teal, apple and lime; our long, crinkly kale is the most flavorful we’ve ever grown; our cucumbers seem ready to leap up from their mounds; and our tomatoes are beginning to give off a spicy aroma, at least if you push your nose in close and inhale.

We try to take things more slowly during the summer.

It was in this spirit that I’ve been reading the stories and essays of “White, Elwyn Brooks. 1899-1985. American writer, b. Mount Vernon, NY.” A copy of Strunk and White has been beside my desk ever since college (for foreign readers, that’s E. B. White and William Strunk, Jr.’s classic text on English prose, The Elements of Style)—but I hadn’t read Stuart Little since childhood. And I was surprised at what I found.