Books, Arts & Manners: Magical Ways

Persons & Masks of the Law By John T. Noonan

Farrar, 206 pp., $10 Professor Noonan has written a difficult but not unrewarding book. His thesis is that in the American legal tradition the people involved in cases are often given masks that conceal their real character or identity. His primary example is the case of the American Negro slaves. Their humanity was shielded in American law behind various descriptions normally reserved for property of one kind or another (real, personal, etc.); and once the law thus considered them to be property, they could be sold, bequeathed, or made the subjects of a variety of court proceedings without anyone’s ever running up against the fact that they were human beings.

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Daniel Oliver

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Persons & Masks of the Law By John T. Noonan

Farrar, 206 pp., $10 Professor Noonan has written a difficult but not unrewarding book. His thesis is that in the American legal tradition the people involved in cases are often given masks that conceal their real character or identity. His primary example is the case of the American Negro slaves. Their humanity was shielded in American law behind various descriptions normally reserved for property of one kind or another (real, personal, etc.); and once the law thus considered them to be property, they could be sold, bequeathed, or made the subjects of a variety of court proceedings without anyone’s ever running up against the fact that they were human beings.