Person:

Halley, Janet

During the trial of the so-called Powder Men--Guy Fawkes and his co-conspirators in the Gunpowder Plot to blow up Parliament with the King, Queen, and heir apparent all in attendance-the King's Attorney General Sir Edward Coke presented into evidence a curious manuscript with two titles. The text's original name was A Treatise of Equivocation, but that had been scratched out and replaced with a new title, A Treatise Against Lying and Fraudulent Dissimulation. It had been discovered in the rooms which one of the conspirators had used in the Inner Temple, and mere possession of this book, Coke clearly thought, spoke loudly of all the defendants' guilt. By delaying the trial long enough to secure this manuscript, Coke ensured that he would be able to continue in a prosecutorial tradition he had established in the trial of the Jesuit Robert Southwell - a tradition of proving treason against English Catholics by representing them as ready equivocators.

The Treatise of Equivocation was written to instruct priests sent on a "mission" established by the Society of Jesus, whose aim was to preserve the Catholic Church in the newest heathen territory, England. The Treatise prepared priests to face the perilous questions asked of them by official interrogators, who as enforcers of the Anglican settlement had devised a series of interrogatories widely known as the "bloody questions" because they could force a Catholic priest to elect between the Queen and the Pope. The stakes were high: the penalty for being a priest in England, an act of treason, was death by public torture.

My classmates Jim Tourtelott, Joe Sommer, and Eva Saks invented the Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities at a Mexican restaurant one night in the fall of 1987. When they announced their idea to me the next day, my first thought was: "Great, now there can be a place to publish the things I want to write." How greedy, and (to say the same thing in a different way) how abject! My reaction reflects not a sense of marginality or deviance (both of these always being tinged with an adventurous self-confidence that was quite absent from my attitude at that moment), but rather a sense of isolation. I could not have had this bland reaction to the proposed oasis unless I had accepted it as a given that my most urgent projects on the Law and Humanities borderline were mine alone. But the idea of the Journal swept through the law school and various graduate departments on a wave of excitement. Clearly I had not been alone and would not be able to imagine myself as isolated again.

This Symposium inhabits two intersections: the intersection linking sexual orientation with other axes of social stratification, and the intersection linking the legal future to the legal past, legal reform to legal history. Francisco Valdes examines the relationship between sex and gender in Euro-American cultural and legal history to support a reform proposal on behalf of "sexual minorities"; Robert J. Morris excavates the cultural history of same-sex relationships in Hawai'i to support a claim that Hawaiian cultural preservation, mandated by the Hawai'i State Constitution, includes recognition of same-sex marriage; and Mary Coombs and Angela Harris provide critical comments on sociological, affiliative, intellectual, and historiographical intersections that structure Morris' and Valdes' claims. Valdes and Morris offer perhaps the most richly researched and polemically targeted cultural-historical accounts of sexual orientation in the law review literature. Particularly with the addition of Coombs' and Harris' critical responses, this Symposium frames the debate for queer legal history and historiography. It should be read under the immemorial motto: Those who don't study historiography are doomed to repeat it.