Disorder in the Court is a collection of accounts of high profile, sensationalized trials, each one addressing a specific question of sexual morality in France or the English Empire at the turn of the century. In the introduction, Nancy Erber and George Robb present an underlying, shared mission of the collected writings:
As the essays reveal, social and sexual behavior are regulated simultaneously by the state and the community, the one chiefly through legislation and the courts, the other mainly by the force of public opinion. Each of the cases in this collection demonstrates the interplay of the two realms (2).
Of the two implications of this proposition (law as both product and producer), the one that tends to be emphasized in Law and Society writings is that legal systems are social creations, which means that there is nothing sacred, universal, or natural about law — legal systems change in time and in space according to changes in social conditions. This flies in the face of the traditional law professor's quest for ultimate truth. The emphasis which Law and Society places on social forces “implies less reverence for the causal force of purely intellectual forces — the role of legal thinkers, formal doctrine, philosophy and theory of law; the role of abstract ideas, rather than concrete interests and behaviors.” The difficulties are that “many professors are themselves intellectuals; they are drawn to theory, to the playful or serious treatment of ideas…[they] are fond of books, essays, and discussions; they are at home in the milieu of argument and logic; grubby facts of the day-to-day life attract them less than the grandness of theory; they are looking for universal truth, and they do not expect to find it among the nuts and bolts of some particular place and time.”
Implicit in the various essays in Disorder in the Court is the belief that legal studies stand to gain considerably from an understanding of the links between legal and social phenomena, and likewise, that the traditional social sciences could benefit from an increased understanding of the ways in which law and society influence one another. More specifically, the accounts of trials in Disorder in the Court show how an examination of the legal system might be instrumental in alleviating some of the empirical problems faced by the social sciences. The difficulties associated with finding objective, scientific evidence of social phenomena are at the core of any inquiry in the social sciences. To the degree that the law effectively and objectively represents the “cultural mood” of a particular society, the sociologist of law is able to find in legal systems an exceptionally useful source of data.
Legal proceedings have frequently been overlooked in the study of past sexual behavior and attitudes and the shifting social meanings associated with them, but now social and gender historians have recognized that legal documents, police archives and court records are rich sources for broadening our understanding of both the legal regulatory process and the complexities of social/sexual relations (3).
In other essays from the context of the English Empire, we see how trials involving questions of sexual morality brought to the surface deep-rooted anxieties over the changing social order. In “A Shock to Marriage?: the Clitheroe Case and the Victorians,” Ginger Frost argues that the Clitheroe Case (involving a husband's kidnapping of his wife, who refused to cohabit) is “symptomatic of an array of contemporary social problems and cannot be reduced to a simple conflict between proponents of institutional male dominance and advocates of women's independence” (101). The case reveals widespread fears over changes in the definition of masculinity, but also to “tremendous concern about marriage” and to the “considerable class bias” of the time.
In “The English Dreyfus Case: Florence Maybrick and the Sexual Double-Standard,” George Robb shows how the trial of Florence Maybrick, a woman accused of poisoning her husband, reveals fears associated with the changing roles of women and their potential to wreak havoc on traditional models of hearth and home. He demonstrates how a “more outspoken feminist consciousness” along with a more explicit conservative defense of traditional family life were each crystallized through the articulations of support and of condemnation of Florence Maybrick.
For the accounts of French trials, the book's American scholars run a greater risk of ethnocentrism, as they move not only from the context of the American legal system based on English, common-law to the French civil law system, but also across important cultural distinctions between English-speaking and French-speaking countries. The empirical problems of social scientists in general are particularly acute in the case of comparative sociological studies, because the possibilities for misinterpretation in this context are greatly compounded. Anthropologist, Clifford Geertz, makes this clear:
The ethnographer does not, and, in my opinion, largely cannot, perceive what his informants perceive. What he perceives, and that uncertainly enough, is what they perceive “with”—or “by means of,” or “through”...or whatever the word should be. In the country of the blind, who are not as unobservant as they look, the one-eyed is not king, he is spectator.
In Disorder in the Court, the essays dealing with trials in the context of France seem to avoid the risks of ethnocentrism and benefit from the cross-cultural perspective by providing unique and commonly concealed interpretations of the prevailing cultural moods. We learn, for example in William Peniston's “A Public Offense against Decency: the Trial of the Count de Germiny and the ‘Moral Order' of the Third Republic”:
throughout the nineteenth century, France was one of the few countries in Europe which did not have a specific law against homosexual behavior… As a result, it had the reputation for openness and toleration which contributed to the development of a male homosexual subculture in Paris. Yet despite this reputation, the very vagueness of the laws allowed the police to turn on homosexuals as scapegoats for the political, social, or economic problems of the times.”(12)
Taken together, the book's essays provide valuable insight into the ways in which various types of discourse associated with legal proceedings (including among other things, police records, trial transcripts, and media representations of trials) might be exploited most effectively by social scientists. The unique insight provided by this kind of use of legal documents is undoubtedly an encouraging contribution to the maturing discipline of Law and Society.
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