Chapter 6 addresses the types of remedies or relief that plaintiffs may obtain when asserting a public nuisance claim for public mass tort harms. In the original understanding of public nuisance as a criminal offense, remedies were limited to fines or a criminal sentence. Traditionally at common law, plaintiffs who prevailed on a public nuisance claim were entitled to an abatement of the nuisance, or an injunction to enjoin continuation of the nusiance, for example closure of a noxious factory or removal of a higway obstruction. The chapter then documents the gradual expansion of public nusiance remedies in the 21st century to embrace the concept of public nusiance abatement funds, whereby offeding defendants are required to pay large sums of money into a abatement fund to cover the cost to municipalities for services involved in abating the nusiance. The chapter additionally discusses the problem of the ability of individuals to obtain compensation apart from the group remedy, through satisfaction of the special injury rule. The exposition chronicles the inconsistent and confusing judicial application of the special injury rule.

Having addressed exploitation and violence towards elders, the book moves to consider how some enslavers chose the less physical – but no less cruel – route of abandoning, selling, or simply neglecting enslaved people once they had become “old and broken.” Chapter 2 covers manumission laws and the efforts of enslavers to work around these; the significance of age to the dynamics of, and experiences in, the internal slave trade; and the tragic consequences of neglect for elders deemed unproductive by those whom enslaved them. Proslavery claims of “retirement” or of care from cradle-to-grave were no match for the economic self-interest of enslavers, small and large, and the driving force of slavery revolved around taking the “best years and the best strength” from enslaved people. This chapter shows how enslaved people understood this exploitative dynamic, and the horrifying consequences of it for Black elders, all too well

This chapter explores the development of a distinctive Faulknerian ontology in relation to the mimetic information paradigm we have explored. I begin by exploring two characters – Dilsey and Miss Quentin – from The Sound and the Fury who provide a paradigm of autonomous personhood that is able to survive within a coercive plantation network. I extend this analysis to Darl Bundren in As I Lay Dying whose narrative arc vividly evokes both the development and dissolution of the mimetic self. Here, Faulkner anticipates a major theme in a number of his later novels, namely, alienation as a facet of modernity, one that compromises the possibility of sensuous or emotional access to others. Finally, I demonstrate how Sanctuary articulates this mimetic dilemma both in the rape of Temple Drake and on a larger social scale, in the hyper-mimetic quality of information flow through complex social systems that rely more on abstraction than on sensuous interpersonal bonds.

Chapter 11 turns to a discussion of the competing arguments concerning the new public nuisance law advanced by practicing attorneys, interest group allies, judges, scholars, and law-and-economics professors. Almost all criticisms of the new public nuisance law have been negative, characterizing expansion of public nuisance law as illegitimate and dysfunctional. These critiques are examined through the lens of various categories of criticism: (1) traditional, (2) formal, (3) institutional, (4) rule of law, (5) democratic theory, and (5) law and economics. The critics all draw on negative examples from the mass tort public nuisance cases in the 21st century (lead paint, firearms, opioids, vaping, climate change). At least one commentator, however, has offered tempered praise for the new public nuisance law as the second best solution to community-wide harms. She believes that the development of the new public nuisance law is in the finest traditon of a flexible, developing common law to meet changed circumsatnces. This commentator would permit continued development of the new public nuisance law, enhanced with several guardrails and transparency in proceedings.

The Sound and the Fury depicts how information at a certain level of complexity acquires its own quasi-agency – a hyper-mimetic ability to replicate itself through surfaces and selves. Among the many objects and surfaces that exhibit this mimetic agency, two images – the clock and the statue – lie at the heart of Faulkner’s cartography of the postbellum plantation system and allow us to understand the author’s diagnosis of the modernization of the planter system, not simply as a scaling social order, but as a coercive flow of ideology in the the era of Jim Crow ascendency. This chapter shows that Faulkner imagines planter heritage as a social force that invades the psyche, vertiginously scaling through a series of mimetic surfaces to find expression both in the financialization of the New South and in the Confederate monuments that replicate ideology through the social body. The statue of the Confederate soldier is the ultimate case in point. The mimetic semblance is not alive, yet a commonality of plantation culture is enacted between this information object and those who are forced to endure its imprint, to become mimetic surfaces robbed of depth and immanent life.

The Unvanquished and Go Down, Moses present a striking response to the earliest cognitive cartography of the Sartoris plantation house. While ideology continues to be preserved and replicated within the principal nodes of social space, Faulkner turns his attention in these works to the disruptive and resistant activity of a hidden interiority within these systems. He employs a variety of images to evoke this emergent interior dimension – from the creek bottom to the burial mound, to the fiery hearth, to the symbolic motif, most importantly, of a submerged woman in the depths, a motif that begins with Eunice’s suicidal act of defiance in Go Down, Moses. Around this last image, Faulkner develops the possibility of alterity, of producing an alternative hub of information flow that is capable of resisting, challenging, and even upending the top-down vertical hegemony that defines the cognitive cartographies of the plantation system. In this chapter, I trace this paradigm as an emergent Faulknerian ethics that emphasizes, above all, the possibility of spontaneous and free movement in social space as well as the paramount value of immanence and interpersonal relationships.

This chapter provides a close reading of Faulkner’s first depiction of the plantation manor and argues that it provides the prototype for a spatial pattern that will be repeated so often and in so many variable forms as to constitute the foundational archetype of networked space and information flow throughout the whole of the Yoknapatawpha fiction. In Flags in the Dust, Faulkner visualizes a vertically-oriented spatial symbolism in which a violent ideology is embedded in the artifacts and aesthetic objects of the Sartoris planter network so that this ideology is capable of replicating its content in individuals who inhabit this space. This predicament is most fully realized in Colonel Sartoris’s statue, for while the man himself is dead, the ideological information of his mimetic print circulates through the financial and technological infrastructure of bank and rail, using the innovations of modernity to disseminate itself even while reinforcing the racial and class suppositions of the slave system that preceded it.

Chapter 7 narrates the development of public nuisance law in the context of environmental contamination litigation. At the outset, the description of environmental litigation notes that these cases represent the oldest and prototypical public nusiance litigation cases, because the cases are closest to an invasion of, or interference with, property rights that are the framework for historical public nuisance claims. The chapter canvasses a wide variety of environmental public nuisance claims relating to contamination of common water sources, noxious plumes emanting from factories and plants, chemical emissions contributing to climate change, oil spill contamination, waste dumps, ground water and soil contamination from various chemicals such as PCBs and MBTEs. The chapter discusses the Supreme Court decision in American Electric Power v. Connecticut (2011), holding that any asserted federal common law public nusiance claim against electric power companies was displaced by the federal Clean Air Act. The chapter contains an examination of federal displacement and preemption doctrine concerning the relationship between several federal and state laws regulating environmental concerns.

Enslaved people commonly claimed they sought to protect the aged from the excesses of their abusers, and were raised to respect their elders. Most scholarship on the topic reinforces this position, with an emphasis on support based on shared oppression and as a form of collective cultural resistance. This chapter, however, considers the consequences when enslaved people appropriated, internalized, or simply shared a belief that old age equated with diminished value and declining powers in work. Respect predicated on agedness was not always meant seriously nor received positively, and the transition to elder could be taken instead as an enforced relegation from the people one had once imagined as peers. The aged party sometimes resented and even resisted the imposition of such a label and its associated narrative, with such tension reflecting broader complexities surrounding age as a chronological, functional, and relational category and identity. People seen as elderly, but who struggled with this categorization of themselves, were forced to make choices – to accept, adapt, or to resist – and this could come at no little cost.

Chapter 3 explores the willingness of some state courts in the early 21st century to consider and approve plaintiffs assertion of public nuisance claims in developing mass tort litigation. This chapter involves a case study of the lead paint litigation, describing high incidences of childhood lead paint poisoning in older buildings as the basis for the lead paint lawsuits. These lawsuits attempted to hold the manufacturers and sellers of lead paint liable on a theory that the defendants created and maintained a public nuisance relating to lead paint. Many courts initially declined to allow plaintiffs to assert public nuisance claims in the lead paint litigation, based on various defenses sounding in lack of proximate caustaion, remoteness, and failure to satify the elements of a public nuisance claim. However, courts in Wisconsin and California subsequently accepted the plaintiffs pleading of a lead paint public nuisance claim, based on the defendants advertising and promotion of their products. These successful lead paint cases illustrated a conceptual breakthrough in judicial receptivity to communitywide public nusiance claims. However, other courts continued to reject lead paint public nuisance claims, illustrating the unsettled nature of public nuisance law.