Sex, Lies and Defamation: The Bush Lawyer of Wessex

Abstract

In the preamble to the program for the conference at which the paper on which this article is based was presented it was suggested that the title of its concluding session, "Old Wine in New Bottles" was perhaps "a metaphor of the law and literature movement." Given the project of this article, which is to take a few risks, breach a few boundaries, in order to show how and why law and literature scholarship and teaching and here I'm quoting from the Graduation Address delivered at Yale Law School's commencement ceremony in June 19891 might "get [the voice of women] back in," it seems appropriate to initiate it by applying a little exegetical scrutiny to the conveners's borrowed metaphor. The source of that metaphor, which has been scrambled in the process of appropriation, is, of course, a master-text of the Law of the Father,2 the Bible. Specifically, it comes from chapter 9 of the Gospel according to Matthew, which is part of the portion of Matthew's teaching that deals with Jesus' miracles of healing. Those miracles were themselves employed by Jesus in the service of his teaching. It is not without relevance to this article that Matthew's Gospel records, shortly before Jesus' remark on wine, two occasions on which he had some troubles with lawyers, specifically in making them listen to and understand his message. The lessons to be drawn from both incidents seem to be that lawyers are depressing materialists because they are only convinced by what they can actually see, and even then are only really convinced by the dramatic;3 further, that they do not, perhaps cannot, understand the implications of doing things in new ways,4 that they deeply suspect what they see to be challenges to the authority that is sanctified by precedent,s and that they don't think much of the voices of ordinary people.6 I should know. I've been one myself, and I suspect that while you can take the woman out of the practice of the law, you can't take the lawyer out of the woman. Jesus makes the remark about new wine in old wineskins (not Old Wine in New Bottles) in order to justify his new ways of doing things, evangelically speaking. And he says, when asked by John's disciples "Why do we and the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?":