MLA 2026 Toronto, January 8-11: Melville and the Law

Melville’s connections to the law are at once biographical, thematic, and pedagogical.  His father-in-law was the enormously influential Massachusetts Chief Justice Lemuel Shaw, who is often cited as a template for Billy Budd’s Captain Vere in his decision to uphold the Fugitive Slave Act.  Lawyers and legal terminology are ubiquitous in his work, from Temple Bar’s bachelors and Bartleby’s Wall Street law office to the deposition in “Benito Cereno.”  Along with Dickens, Kafka, and Shakespeare, Melville is a mainstay of Law and Literature syllabi in English departments and law schools; Moby-Dick’s miniature treatise on possession and ownership, “Fast-Fish and Loose-Fish,” is even cited in some legal casebooks on property law.

This Melville Society MLA panel invites papers that consider any aspect of Melville’s writing, biography, and reception in relation to legal history, legal theory, or legal institutions.  Papers may consider, for instance:

• Melville’s depiction of legal institutions, processes, and actors (e.g., trials, lawyers, contracts, property, inheritance);
• Melville’s work in relation to its legal-historical context (e.g., “Benito Cereno” and legal cases involving slave insurrections; Billy Budd and the Fugitive Slave Act);
• Legal theory as a lens on themes of Melville’s work (e.g., sovereignty, personhood, violence, natural law);
• Melville’s reception history in legal institutions and contexts (e.g., citations in judicial opinions and legal treatises; Melville’s place in the Law and Literature canon).

Please submit 250-word abstracts and CVs to Geoffrey Kirsch (gk499@cam.ac.uk) by March 7.