Robert Deal, The Law of the Whale Hunt: Dispute Resolution, Property Law, and American Whalers, 1780-1880 (2016). Robert Deal is a historian at Marshall University. His book is a nuanced account of the nineteenth-century British and American whaling industry and how it was misunderstood by contemporary lawyers and judges and continues to be misunderstood by present-day legal scholars. Herman Melville famously wrote in Moby-Dick that whalemen settled their disputes using ‘hard words and harder knocks – the Coke-Upon-Littleton of the fist’ (Moby-Dick, Chapter 89). As Deal shows, however, little violence actually sprung up when the crews of two (or more) ships pursued a whale but only one took it … (more)
[Angela Fernandez, JOTWELL, 1 May]
First posted 2017-05-02 06:17:15
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