Crypts of Memories and Law’s Desire. Modernist Reconfigurations of Literary and Legal Traditions

The essay explores the profound impact of modernist revisions of time, memory, and narrative in the legal domain. By tracing the fragmentation of linear chronologies and the destabilization of historical certainties introduced by modernist literature (from Virginia Woolf to T.S. Eliot), it reveals how the epistemology of tradition was reimagined as a dynamic interplay between pastness and presence, permanence and loss. The investigation highlights how these shifts not only influenced literary forms, but also fundamentally reshaped both, methodologically, the ways in which legal traditions are conceptualized in contemporary comparative discourse and, substantively, the formation of American legal consciousness. As for the first aspect, the analysis focuses on the seminal works of Patrick Glenn and Harold J. Berman. With respect to the second, a critical reading is offered of Holmes’s and Cardozo’s jurisprudence as a formative source for the internal rearticulation of the American common law tradition. Particular emphasis is placed on the rediscovery of dissenting opinions as privileged sites of active memory and counter-narrative, embodying the tension between stability and transformation.