The Violence of Legal Conviction: Institutional Power and Ethical Failure in Billy Budd and Les Misérables

This article has argued that Billy Budd and Les Misérables exemplify the potential violence of legal conviction when institutional certainty loses sight of ethical judgment. Their importance lies not in raising questions about specific unjust laws or severe sentences, but in challenging the way institutions generate authoritativeness about human action. In Billy Budd, the authoritative description of Claggart’s discipline is itself merely another example of how suspicion can be institutionally credible. Billy's moral nature does not provide him with equivalent authoritative knowledge, and the institution finally interprets his deed as action within the discipline of a rigid military order. For Captain Vere, the tragedy is in that last interpretation--namely, that he realizes the law may produce an ethically objectionable outcome. In addition to this, he believes it is an institutional duty to do so. Melville thus exposes the possibility that institutional violence might arise not from obvious corruption but from sincerity in duty. In Les Misérables, Javert makes a different example of institutional certainty: the inability of the law to respond to an altered identity. His failure to perceive the changed man in Jean Valjean is an example of the legal identity becoming subject to temporally urgent memory. Hugo offers an alternative embodied by Bishop Myriel and exercised by Valjean: justice can be embodied in compassion, responsibility, moral transformation, and social reintegration. The comparative argument has led to three principal conclusions: First, institutions not only punish but generate authoritative descriptions of individuals and events. Foucault can help in understanding this action by considering the role of observation, classification, and judgment. Second, legal correctness does not guarantee ethically correct outcomes. This is why Rawls and Sen are important. Finally, works of literature can serve as counter-discursive space in which institutional reasoning can be re-evaluated. Through the specificities of individual and character, multiple perspectives, and moral depth, literature restores ambiguity to actors. Moreover, it also reinvestigates the public sphere who have been reduced to legal or political categories. Nussbaum's position illuminates the importance of this work. The main principle to be extracted from these texts is that the law must answer moral judgment. While institutions are necessary, human institutions require human moral vigilance. Any legal system is dangerous when its categories distort reality and deny the capacity to interpret differently. The violence of conviction begins not with punishment but with the degree of certitude with which the accused is labeled, when complete certainty blocks off alternative judgment; when the accused is viewed as an institutional rather than human actor; when changes of social or circumstantial context are disregarded; when the connotation of past actions becomes invariant; and when procedural correctness becomes tantamount to moral correctness. Both works reject these kinds of certitude. Melville presents the reader with the unresolved tragedy of authority, innocence, judgment, and necessity. Hugo offers the reader an alternative model in which compassion and moral change stave off cycles of punishment. Taken together, they demonstrate that the key to identifying the problematic of the legal conviction rests with the human behind the courtroom. This conclusion will have a specific relevance to the study of literature and law, for they show not only how legal institutions seek resolution, but that the reason for them is the intractability of the human subject. Human beings are never fully known in the manner of legal categories; hence ethical institutions require not only judgment, but also the capacity to re-judge. To this end, the law cannot remain dominant, and the tragedy of the novel lies with the way the legal category increasingly emerges as the human actor in the tragedy.

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