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  Red Cardinal, White Snow

  Susan Ayres

  In Red Cardinal, White Snow, Susan Ayres tells us in the first poem that childhood is not a meadow, and she will document the spirit shatter of mental illness and family trauma. But these stunning poems do so for the sake of talking back to ruin, showing us the beauty of love under pressure, how illumination coexists with heartache, and disorder strengthens kindness. These poems are a master class in the art of becoming human.

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  Walk Like the Bird Flies

  Susan Ayres

  These poems transport us from Texas desert landscapes to New England mountains to Adriatic tavernas, festivals, and landmarks, and at the same time they offer vivid confrontations with the elements of the natural world—mud, fire, water, forests, the wind that possibly “[carries] messages from beyond”—treating both foreign cities and nature’s manifestations as phenomena to observe and honor through the eyes of an estranged but receptive traveler. Susan Ayres fuses images from inner and outer landscapes, raising questions that can’t be answered and perspectives that can’t be contained but nevertheless offer sparks of revelation in poem after poem.

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  Redaction

  Titus Kaphar and Reginald Dwayne Betts

  MacArthur fellows Reginald Dwayne Betts and Titus Kaphar present a stunning literary and artistic collaboration that confronts the abuses of the criminal justice system. Throughout their award-winning careers, visual artist and filmmaker Titus Kaphar and poet, memoirist, and attorney Reginald Dwayne Betts have shed light on the violences of incarceration and the underexplored contradictions of American history. In Redaction, they unite their different mediums to expose the ways the legal system exploits and erases the poor and incarcerated from public consciousness. First exhibited at MoMA PS1, the fifty "Redaction" prints layer Kaphar's etched portraits of incarcerated individuals with Betts's poetry, which uses the legal strategy of redaction to craft verse out of legal documents. Three prints are broken apart into their distinct layers, illuminating how the pair manipulated traditional engraving, printing, poetic, and redaction processes to reveal what is often concealed. This beautifully designed volume also includes additional artwork, poetry, and an introduction by MoMA associate director Sarah Suzuki. The result is an astonishing, powerful exploration of history, incarceration, and race in America.

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  Law & Poetry: Promises from the Preamble

  Kristen David Adams

  This anthology uses themes from the Preamble to the Constitution as a structure and framework to present fifty-six poems, one for each state, the District of Columbia, and each of the five territories that, together, comprise the United States of America. Some of the poems were written by lawyers, some have obvious legal themes, and others illuminate legal concepts more obliquely. Is there a connection between law and poetry? This anthology suggests the answer is “yes.” A case or code helps to reveal what the law is. A treatise or law review article helps to reveal what the law should be. Poetry about the law, however, may be the single most effective way to connect with the human experience of the law – what it feels like to be the judge, juror, the attorney, the witness, or even the accused. In this anthology of poems, you will discover new connections between law and poetry. The anthology includes 56 poems – one for each state, the District of Columbia, and five U.S. territories. Many are written by famous poets, while others may be unfamiliar. This anthology was inspired by Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address in 1861 where he states, “Continue to exercise all the express provisions of our National Constitution, and the Union will endure forever. . . .” As Editor Kristen Adams notes, one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was “to form a more perfect Union.” With this goal in mind, this anthology uses the language from the Preamble to the Constitution as a structure and framework. The collection is separated into sections using language and themes from the Preamble. Each section seeks to challenge the reader to consider how the promises and ideals of the Preamble might be fulfilled by “the better angels of our nature,” and to illuminate opportunities for changes that might assist in reaching those ideals.

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  Felon

  Reginald Dwayne Betts

  A searing volume by a poet whose work conveys "the visceral effect that prison has on identity" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). Felon tells the story of the effects of incarceration in fierce, dazzling poems-canvassing a wide range of emotions and experiences through homelessness, underemployment, love, drug abuse, domestic violence, fatherhood, and grace-and, in doing so, creates a travelogue for an imagined life. Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of post incarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person's life. The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility-from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume's radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates. Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."

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  Lawyers, Poets, and that World We Call Law

  James R. Elkins

  Most of the lawyer poets represented in this anthology are practicing lawyers (and judges); a few abandoned the legal profession to take up teaching or literary work. Unlike most lawyer poets, who do not, in their poetry, explicitly lay claim to being lawyers and maintain a wall of separation between law and poetry, the poets in this anthology do not remain silent about the legal world in which they work. The lawyer poet who would disguise his life as a lawyer is one kind of poet. This anthology represents a rarer specimen, the poet who finds a place for the world of law in his poetry. For this rare species of poet, there's simply no walking away, no pretended separation, and no compartmentalization of the world of the poem and the world of law. The poet knows both worlds, and thus is borne legal verse.

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  Poetry of the Law: From Chaucer to the Present

  David Kader and Michael Stanford

  Since the time of Blackstone's "Farewell," poetry has been seen as celestial, pastoral, solitary, and mellifluous; law as venerable, social, urban, and cacophonous. This perception has persisted even to the present, with the bourgeoning field of law and literature focusing almost exclusively on fiction and drama. Poetry of the Law, however, reveals the richness of poetry about the law. Poetry of the Law is the first serious anthology of law-related poetry ever published in the United States. As the editors make clear, though, serious need not imply solemn. Instead, David Kader and Michael Stanford have assembled a surprisingly capacious collection of 100 poems from the 1300s to the present. Set in courtrooms, lawyers' offices, law-school classrooms, and judges' chambers; peopled with attorneys, the imprisoned (both innocent and guilty), judges, jurors, witnesses, and law-enforcement officers; based on real events (think "Scottsboro") or exploring the complexity of abstract legal ideas; the poems celebrate justice or decry the lack of it, ranging in tone from witty to wry, sad to celebratory, funny to infuriating. Poetry of the Law is destined to become an authoritative source for years to come.

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  Hadley v. Baxendale and other Common Law Borrowings from Civil Law

  Wayne Barnes

  Containing Wayne Barnes’s discussion of Hadley v. Baxendale and other Common Law Borrowings from Civil Law. In 1854, the English Exchequer Court delivered the landmark case of Hadley v. Baxendale. That case provided, for the first time in the common law, a defined rule regarding the limitations on recovery of damages for breach of contract. It has been widely celebrated as a landmark in the law of contracts, and more widely as a triumph of the common law system. A little over a decade after it was decided, it had already become highly regarded, for Chief Baron Pollock stated in 1866: “[A] more extensive and accurate knowledge of decisions in our law books, and a more accurate power of analyzing and discussing them, and...a larger acquaintance with the exigencies of commerce and the business of life, never combined to assist at the formation of any decision.” White & Summers state that knowledge of the case “has become a sine qua non to second-year standing in law school.” Richard Danzig notes the “pedagogical centrality” of the case, and its characterization as a “judicial invention.” Corbin has claimed that Hadley is “more often cited as authority than any other case in the law of damages.” Perhaps most famously of all, Grant Gilmore stated that “Hadley v. Baxendale is still, and presumably always will be, a fixed star in the jurisprudential firmament.” This article explores whether this recognition is fully deserved, as the civil law was most assuredly referenced for the Hadley rule. As it turns out such legal transplants are extraordinarily common, and there are many other instances in which Anglo-American courts have borrowed from the civil law for purposes of “creating” new common law doctrine. Seen in that light, the genius of the “common law” Hadley rule takes on additional depth and perspective.

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  Constitutional Law Haiku

  Gil Grantmore

  Contains Law Professor Gil Grantmore’s Constitutional Law Haiku on page 481.

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  The Wallace Stevens Case: Law and the Practice of Poetry

  Thomas Grey

  Wallace Stevens was not only one of America's outstanding modernist poets but also a successful insurance lawyer--a fact that continues to intrigue many readers. Though Stevens tried hard to separate his poetry from his profession, legal theorist Thomas Grey shows that he did not ultimately succeed. After stressing how little connection appears on the surface between the two parts of Stevens's life, Grey argues that in its pragmatic account of human reasoning, the poetry distinctively illuminates the workings of the law. In this important extension of the recent law-and-literature movement, Grey reveals Stevens as a philosophical poet and implicitly a pragmatist legal theorist, who illustrates how human thought proceeds through "assertion, qualification, and qualified reassertion," and how reason and passion fuse together in the act of interpretation. Above all, Stevens's poetry proves a liberating antidote to the binary logic that is characteristic of legal theory: one side of a case is right, the other wrong; conduct is either lawful or unlawful. At the same time as he discovers in Stevens a pragmatist philosopher of law, Grey offers a strikingly new perspective on the poetry itself. In the poems that develop Stevens's "reality-imagination complex"--poems often criticized as remote, apolitical, and hermetic--Grey finds a body of work that not only captivates the reader but also provides a unique instrument for scrutinizing the thought processes of lawyers and judges in their exercise of social power.