Kafka's Indictment of Modern Law by Douglas E. Litowitz

Author:Douglas E. Litowitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780700624744
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Published: 2017-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

Turow is a great writer and an insightful social critic, but in the fictional legal world that he has created, the characters have full names, the plot is framed as a “lawyer’s story,” and the issues are clearly stated—all of which masterfully brings the reader into a world that they did not know. Similarly, in John Grisham’s The Partner, the defendant is an attorney charged with commission of a white-collar crime, in a trial held in a public courtroom. Grisham is also a great writer who creates ingenious plots. Turow and Grisham have a mass audience because they are demystifyers—they offer the possibility of pulling back the curtain and showing us the inner workings of the system; that is their talent, and it is to their credit. But how different all of this seems from Kafka’s The Trial, which begins with the arrest of Josef K. on mysterious charges and ends with his execution by an unknown authority: “Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was arrested.… What sort of men were they? What were they talking about? What office did they represent?”13 By the end of the novel, Josef K. is no closer to understanding the law, and his lawyer has proven completely useless. Kafka blocks the idea of access to the legal inside, often suggesting that there is no inside at all, only a series of doorkeepers guarding an empty house. Furthermore, Kafka’s world is populated with people who are denied any voice in the political and legal system, but who internalize their subjugation to the point where they expect and even enjoy the denial of their demands for justice. The end result is a negative utopia, a nightmarish world where each person fears that she might be violating some unknowable law, creating a paradoxical condition where people cannot know the law but constantly fear that they have violated it. For Kafka, this is how the legal system appears to those who are caught up in it. Such characters have only an inchoate and vague sense of their own exploitation, and they seem doomed by an inability to challenge the system in which they are caught up, a state of mind that Kafka illustrates in the final act of The Trial, where the central character leads his executioners to the place where he will be slaughtered, too resigned to even run away or call a policeman.

Kafka must have felt that the outsider perspective was the key to understanding modern law, but, again, it is a system of outsiders without anyone on the inside. So what holds it together—how can a social practice be based on something that is empty?

Actually this happens all the time. As long as people believe that there is a center, then it will hold, much in the same way that currency holds its value despite consisting (physically, that is) of bits of colored paper held together by the belief that such paper has value. This

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