Dylan C. McGuinty Jr.
Law, Letters, and Ideas
Law, literature and philosophy are woven together into the fabric of society. Further, the law mediates the relationships that make up society. As such, lawyers are doctors of relationship, putting in place measures that give expression to their fullness and their limits. In that spirit, these essays are intended to enrich conversations that improve the human condition.
Making a Waste Land: Ezra Pound, Fragmentation, and the Politics of Cultural Order
T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is one of the most celebrated poems of the twentieth century. Less celebrated — though no less consequential — is the role Ezra Pound played in making it. This essay examines what Pound’s editorial hand reveals about fragmentation, authority, and the politics of cultural order.
Read the essayA Critique of Pure Liberalism: For a Liberal Restoration
Liberalism’s great achievement was the emancipation of the individual from arbitrary power. Its present crisis is the erosion of the very institutions — legal, civic, cultural — that made that emancipation possible and durable. This essay argues for a restoration of liberalism grounded in its classical foundations.
Read the essayThe Peignoir, the Parrot, and the Death of Heaven: Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning”
A woman in a peignoir, a green parrot, and the absence of God: Manet’s “Young Lady in 1866” and Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” share a startling constellation of images. This essay reads them together as meditations on beauty, mortality, and the secular sublime.
Read the essayChrist’s Last Will and Testament: If Jesus Had a Will, What Would It Have Said?
Jesus of Nazareth died without a will — or did he? This essay takes the question seriously as a legal and theological exercise: examining what a first-century Jewish testator might have bequeathed, to whom, and under what law. The result is a meditation on inheritance, sacrifice, and the jurisprudence of grace.
Read the essayDouble Wages: Homer’s Laestrygonians and the Twenty-Four-Hour Economy
Among the monsters encountered by Odysseus on his journey home, the Laestrygonians are easily mistaken for merely another race of Homeric giants. Yet before Homer reveals them as cannibals, he gives us an unexpected description of their economy — one that is extraordinarily modern. This essay reads the episode as a meditation on production without purpose, economic activity without human limits, and appetite without restraint.
Read the essayThe House of Odysseus: Succession, Stewardship, and the Kingdom of the Family
The crisis at the beginning of The Odyssey is usually described as the absence of Odysseus. That is true, but incomplete. This essay reads Homer’s poem as a philosophy of succession — of stewardship, inheritance, and the obligations that flow between generations.
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