Pro Bono Publico

This essay reads the "Cyclops" episode of Ulysses in light of laws of alcohol consumption, specifically the 1900 act governing the licensing of pubs in Ireland. It uses the legal context to understand James Joyce's suggestion of public space as a discursive construction, made up of language and sociality.

“Nobody Owns”

This essay analyzes scenes from Ulysses alongside the legal regimes governing tenancy in 1904 Ireland. Summarizing the historical conflict between Brehon law and colonial versions of tenancy, Gibson shows James Joyce's ambivalence about both, and argues that Ulysses exposes the social and class disaster that was rentier culture in early 1900s Dublin.

Introduction

The introduction offers an overview of legal issues pertaining to James Joyce's life and work. It reviews the previous criticism on this topic and summarizes/previews the contents of the volume. These synopses become the basis of Goldman's argument that research in legal history offers new insight into the implications of narrative developments in Joyce's Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. These writings include scenes inflected by laws governing, for example, alcohol, public space, marital infidelity, and tenancy. Joyce's work can be seen as critiquing these and other legal regimes. Goldman argues that reading Joyce alongside the law supports and enriches current strategies in Joyce and modernist scholarship.

Literature Meets Law in Court

This essay critiques John Quinn—pillorying the lawyer's failed defense of Ulysses after U.S. Customs Agents confiscated the book—and lauds the work of the judges Augustus Hand and John Woolsey in the successful trials of James Joyce’s Ulysses's of the next decade.

The Law in/of Finnegans Wake

This essay argues that scholars have underestimated the degree to which Finnegans Wake is shaped by James Joyce's interest in and reading about law and legal history, specifically the Bywaters trial and Maamtrasna murder trial. More generally it shows the book's debt to the notion of legal inquiry, a mode he asserts is fundamental to its structure and technique.

“Eating orangepeels in the park”

This essay examines the legal contexts surrounding the protests against Queen Victoria’s Ireland visit in 1900, referred to repeatedly in James Joyce's writing, notably in "Island of Saints and Sages" and in Leopold Bloom's internal monologue in Ulysses. The essay recounts how Maude Gonne wrote a scathing article about the royal visit,"The Famine Queen," for The United Irishmen, which was immediately suppressed over concerns of sedition. This in turn led to Gonne's criminal libel case, for which Arthur Griffith's testimony against Ramsay Colles, publisher and editor of The Irish Figaro, was crucial, D'arcy locates hitherto overlooked references to these developments all over Ulysses and theWake.

Rights and Losses

Rich Cole's essay reads laws of minority rights in Europe to challenge the tendency for cultural historians to understand the human rights revolution as beginning in the 1940s with signing of the the UN Charter. James Joyce's Cyclops, for instance, is written in such a way that it intersperses voices of national sovereignty with an increased rights consciousness brought about by global market forces. The citizen and the court trial provide two obvious points of reference to trace emerging debates about the promise of global constitutionalism and liberal rights claims to counter imperial oppression in pre-war Dublin.

Criminal Conversation

Utell treats marriage laws to read Joyce's scenes of what she calls "criminal conversation"—legally risky discursive interactions of married characters (not with their spouses). Her analysis assesses the legal implications of marital disquiet in the major Joyce texts and also in Giacomo Joyce and Exiles, arguing that these works are essential to understanding Joyce's critique of the legal boundaries of wedlock.

The Past and Future of Joycean Copyright

This essay chronicles how copyright has affected the publication of James Joyce's work, the scholarly and aesthetic use of Joyce's words, and how the legal regime has been used in criticism. It offers prognosticatory thoughts on the outcomes of recent technological developments and copyright changes: "new scholarship can quote more liberally and editions can present the novel in a fashion that speaks to the changing scope of Joyce scholarship in the twenty-first century." While research continues in the history of Joyce and copyright, this essay gives an overview of how this legal regime has inflected Joyce studies thus far.

Ulysses as Deodand

Departing from critical predecessors, this essay treats Ulysses as the protagonist of sorts in James Joyce's battles against suppression. The essays shows that the material book "stood accused as a sort of dangerous instrumentality, a res or thing subject to the strictures of civil forfeiture" and treats it as a "defendant" and a "deodand"—an object removed from its context and put on trial. The essay valorizes the judicial daring that resisted and reversed such treatment.