30 Lawyers, 30 Books: Thane Rosenbaum
Thane Rosenbaum in The ABA Journal, July 27, 2011Media Source
Thane Rosenbaum
The Trial by Franz Kafka
As founding director of Fordham Law School’s immensely popular Forum on Law, Culture & Society, Thane Rosenbaum has pulled together some of the most prestigious gatherings of lawyers, judges, writers, actors and academics in the nation. He’s also an award-winning novelist; Fordham’s John Whelan Distinguished Lecturer in Law; and the editor of Law Lit: From Atticus Finch to The Practice.
“Franz Kafka’s masterpiece is a cautionary tale about the soul-crushing dimensions of the legal system. More allegory than story, this nightmarish parable makes being turned into a bug an improvement over what happens to Joseph K. on the day when officers of the court pay him a visit. Though they leave without ever charging or arresting him, they inform him that he is the subject of a legal proceeding where his guilt is certain. There is no actual legal trial in The Trial (spoiler alert), just the human trial of a man forever transformed by the grinding gears of the law. Joseph K. spends the novel desperately seeking an acquittal from a nameless crime while all of Prague becomes a prison on account of a legal proceeding that can’t be stopped even though it has barely begun.”
