Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2009
Summary
The d'Hauteville case is not the typical kind of case recovered from the legal dustbin and subjected to intensive study. It is simply not very important by orthodox legal standards. Its main event was a trial in a lowly municipal criminal court. And the case never reached an appellate tribunal, and thus did not become a binding precedent in the conventional sense of that word. Even its subject, a parental custody fight over a two-year-old boy, excludes it from the innumerable collections of great cases devoted as they are to crime, politics, and commerce. Yet the more I studied the d'Hauteville case, the more I realized that it had a particular importance.
As in innumerable legal contests from the Salem witchcraft trials of the 1690s to the Rodney King and O. J. Simpson trials of the 1990s, I discovered that the d'Hauteville case was not a single event in a courtroom but a set of multiple legal experiences that exposed timebound and timeless realities of American legal culture. The case began in an insular way, as a domestic drama must, with the rapid rise and equally fast fall of the d'Hauteville marriage. But as the fight for their son Frederick displaced their marriage as the central focus of Ellen and Gonzalve's relationship, the law assumed a greater and greater presence in their lives. The pair not only confronted contradictions between their own ideas about justice and the legal rules they had to learn, they also experienced the transformation of their domestic tragedy into a legal event with innumerable participants, from lawyers, judges, and legislators to courtroom spectators, newspaper reporters, and diarists.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- A Judgment for SolomonThe d'Hauteville Case and Legal Experience in Antebellum America, pp. ix - xvPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996