RIS ID

77783

Publication Details

Pether, P. J. (2012). "Free at last"?: epilogues, aftermaths, and plotting the nation: Review article: Christopher Tomlins, Freedom Bound: Law, Labor, and Civic Identity in Colonizing English America, 1580-1865 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010). Law and Literature, 24 (1), 102-111.

Abstract

To the right, one mile farther west, beyond the green-and-yellow BP station at Exit 176, down State route 338 and past the recently subdivided, gated country club community named Triple Crown, stands the same quaindy spired Presbyterian Church where Margaret Garner's owners, their neighbors, and many neighborhood slaves (including Margaret) attended Sunday services.7 Weisenburger goes on to tell that "[f ]rom the road one can see the rooms where Margaret Garner and her children did domestic labor and suffered whatever indignities or threats or assaults finally compelled her to run"8: [...] for reasons that might be obvious, I don't often quote Paul Carrington, but a line from Carrington's jeremiad against critical legal scholarship seemed paradoxically of relevance to the story Freedom Bound tells: The law ... is a mere hope that people who apply the lash of power will seek to obey the law's command, [the mask of its authority, if accepted, exposes the lawyer to the contemplation of] the dreadful reality of government by cunning and a society in which the only right is might.

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Link to publisher version (DOI)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/lal.2012.24.1.102