{"id":2894,"date":"2019-11-22T11:23:56","date_gmt":"2019-11-22T16:23:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/?p=2894"},"modified":"2020-09-24T00:30:39","modified_gmt":"2020-09-24T04:30:39","slug":"conventions-of-peers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/2019\/11\/22\/conventions-of-peers\/","title":{"rendered":"Conventions of Peers"},"content":{"rendered":"

Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh<\/a><\/p>\n

BOOK THE FIRST. \u00a0Chapter the fifth. \u00a0Of the COUNCILS belonging to the KING.<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

This chapte<\/a>r describes the four different consular bodies that advise the King of England: parliament, the peers of the realm, the judges of the courts of law, and the privy council. \u00a0Among other things, we learn that along with parliamentary sessions, \u201cinstances of conventions of the peers, to advise the king,\u201d were once common. \u00a0(p. 221)<\/p>\n

One of pleasures of reading Blackstone is catching sight of the cultural ephemera he occasionally uncovers (or, for all I know, invents). \u00a0The sections on governmental structures have been particularly rich. \u00a0For instance, in\u00a0an earlier chapter<\/a>\u00a0we were informed that a member of the house of lords, on his way to and from parliament, may,\u00a0while passing through the king\u2019s forests,\u00a0\u201ckill one or two of the king\u2019s deer without warrant,\u201d but only \u201cin view of the forester, if he be present; or on blowing a horn if he be absent, that he may not seem to take the king\u2019s venison by stealth.\u201d (pp 161-62) \u00a0In\u00a0this chapter<\/a>, Blackstone mentions a real estate deal between Henry IV (1366-1413) and the earl of Northumberland, in which the lands\u2019 value was to be settled by parliament \u201cif any should be called before the feast of St Lucia or otherwise by advice of the grand council (of peers) which the king promises to assemble before the said feast.\u201d (p. 221)<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know why exactly, but I find these evocations of aristocratic life in Ye Olde England oddly engaging. \u00a0I am not at all interested in the kind of detailed histories that readily provide this kind of information. \u00a0But there\u2019s something about having it slipped in on the edges of a more abstract project that makes it kind of shimmer \u2014 little concrete bits of lived experience that are inevitably so much more involved than even complex legal rules and governmental structures. \u00a0Catching just a glimpse of this stuff out of the corner of one\u2019s eye makes it seem mysterious and meaningful.<\/p>\n

The other thing that makes these descriptions resonant, I think, is the ritualization \u2014 which over the distance of centuries appears in all its strange distinction. \u00a0The customs Blackstone describes are part of lived experience, as opposed to the abstraction of legal doctrines, but not ordinary lived experience. \u00a0There\u2019s a kind of performed formality that overwhelms intention here \u2014 I mean, blowing the horn before killing the deer? \u00a0(And by the way, are these tame deer that just stand around while people blow horns at them? \u00a0I mean maybe so \u2014 they\u2019re in the royal forest after all \u2014 maybe they\u2019re tame. \u00a0Ugh. \u00a0Surely not. \u00a0Maybe you\u2019re supposed to blow the horn just after you\u2019ve killed one? \u00a0That makes more sense.) \u00a0In any case, reading about the horn blowing and the feast of St. Lucia and the king \u201cissu[ing] out writs under the great seal to call a great council\u201d (p. 221) made me think of the observation in my new favorite book, that \u201critual creates and re-creates a world of social convention and authority beyond the inner will of any individual.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/a>Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity,<\/a><\/em>\u00a0<\/em>Seligman et al. (Oxford 2008) at 11.<\/p>\n

It so happens that when I read\u00a0this chapter\u00a0<\/a>of Blackstone I was myself attending a kind of consular session. \u00a0It was a gathering of county election officials, voting rights advocates, and academics\u00a0convened by a midwestern Secretary of State to advise on policy reforms. \u00a0And I began to reflect on all the ways the familiar forms of the conference that I usually take completely for granted might shimmer to some future observer as selected tidbits of ritualized twenty-first century governmental culture. \u00a0 The shiny folders with the state seal on the front, those clear plastic pockets on braided black cords with the little aluminum clips that held the preprinted name tags we all wore around our necks. \u00a0The \u201cworking lunch\u201d at round tables draped in heavy white cloths, with rolls served with tongs, little round butter pats molded into rosettes, and waiters in black jackets passing plates and pouring out coffee from brown plastic beakers. \u00a0And the clothes \u2014 the care each participant put into choosing what to wear \u2014 \u00a0the men in suits, or a least shirts and ties; the women in suits, too, mostly, and stockings, heels, makeup. \u00a0Local voting rights advocates wore brighter colors and drapier textures \u2014 as if exercising their prerogative to dress in this freer, livelier more comfortable style, as a reward, or a badge of honor, for eschewing official power, national visibility, and\/or academic tenure, all of which for some reason demand clothes that are tighter, darker and less forgiving.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to trivialize or mock the modern equivalents of the ceremonies accompanying the policy convocations Blackstone describes. \u00a0These days, any mention of such details generally signals an intent to do just that. \u00a0But I actually think these things are important. Without them you have a lot of smart, experienced people who would be better occupied at home by themselves thinking and writing and maybe talking to each other sometimes, but you don\u2019t have a council, you don\u2019t have a conference, you don\u2019t have a convention. \u00a0It\u2019s the conventions that make the convention.\u00a0\u00a0And, in some sense, it\u2019s out of this kind of conventional formality that policies get made. \u00a0Otherwise you just have ideas. Policies are something more concrete than ideas \u2014 though maybe not as concrete as, say, practices.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s almost as if you take the participants\u2019 theories and ideas and memories and suggestions and mix them with the concretized ritual practices and objects of the conference \u2014 the milling and talking, the hugs and handshakes and pecks on the cheek, the agendas and water pitchers and cardboard name placards and little gelatinous chocolate mousse cylinders and somehow the very concreteness of these predictable \u201cconventional\u201d acts and objects mixes with the abstract content of people\u2019s thoughts, opinions and proposals and becomes that abstract-practical hybrid thing: \u00a0policy.<\/p>\n

Then I had to come home from that convention of my peers because my mother \u2014 who is 91 \u2014 fell down. \u00a0And on the plane I was thinking how picky my generally easy-going mother was until quite recently about a certain few things, for instance the way she drank her coffee (the cup had to have a thin lip) and the way she always opened up one corner of the little sugar packet and poured in just a few grains and stirred, stirred, stirred with a spoon and then set the spoon down on a napkin \u2014 and how if there wasn\u2019t a spoon or a napkin she kind of acted like civilization might just be coming to an end. \u00a0And I was thinking, well, maybe so. \u00a0Because, as Seligman\u00a0et al<\/em>. put it, such rituals \u201ccreate[] a shared and conventional world of human sociality.\u201d (p. 17 ) And for my poor mother, the loss of the ability \u2014 or inclination? \u2014 to drink her coffee in her own particular ritualized fashion snuck in there sometime shortly before she lost the ability to drink coffee without spilling it, and really seems to have been the beginning of the end of the world.<\/p>\n\n

Tweet<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jessie Allen, School of Law, University of Pittsburgh BOOK THE FIRST. \u00a0Chapter the fifth. \u00a0Of the COUNCILS belonging to the KING. This chapter describes the four different consular bodies that advise the King of...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[268,255,492],"tags":[132,200],"class_list":["post-2894","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-jurisprudence","category-law-and-philosophy","category-william-blackstone","tag-news","tag-william-blackstone"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pasVL2-KG","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2894"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3015,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2894\/revisions\/3015"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2894"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2894"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hedgehogsandfoxes.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2894"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}