Joyce in Court: James Joyce and the Law

Hardiman, a lawyer and onetime member of the Irish Supreme Court who died in 2016, sheds new light on James Joyce’s Ulysses—which he calls “the first great monument of modernist literature”—by way of the 18 civil cases referred to in its text. Spanning several decades and ranging from an obscure case of breach of promise for marriage to a trial for cattle maiming whose unjustly convicted victim was exonerated with the help of Sherlock Holmes’s creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, these historical cases, as Hardiman shows, reflect Joyce’s epistemological concern with “how the law resolved the uncertainties of a case” and, more importantly, “the need for philosophical and judicial doubt as a proper, moral, and humane reaction to the inadequacy of evidence.” The bulk of the book concerns Joyce’s interest in the legal system, and the rest with the prosecution of Ulysses for obscenity in the U.S. and U.K. (Hardiman notes wryly that “interest in the work was so slight” in Joyce’s native Ireland that it was never banned there.) Hardiman provides an insightful consideration of Joyce’s masterpiece from a refreshingly different angle.[em](May) [/em]