Shouting Softly: Essays in Law, Literature, and Culture

(St. Augustine’s Press, 2021)

In this first quarter of the twenty-first century, the most crucial question is whether popular sovereignty and the rule of law can survive in an America riven by partisan politics and dominated by tech oligarchs. Allen Mendenhall is one of our most incisive, brilliant and erudite critics of law and literature. In this wonderful and dazzling survey volume Mendenhall, with mordant wit and Southern brio, does nothing less than seek to salvage not only what is best in our jurisprudence, but also our literary and critical tradition. This meditation on what Mendenhall calls “Law and nomocracy” is worthy of one of his favorite subjects, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. – the only authentic sage of American legal thought – and is an antidote to the pernicious theories now dominant in the academy and on much of the bench.   An invaluable tour-de-force.— Stephen B. Presser, Raoul Berger Professor of Legal History Emeritus, and author of Law Professors: Three Centuries of Shaping American Law.