Uriel Procaccia

A review of Dante and the Limits of the Law, by Justin Steinberg: (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016), 240 pp.,

Professor Justin Steinberg has written a thoroughly erudite and engagingly styled volume on Dante Alighieri’s entire œuvre, but especially on his Commedia, as a reflection of the poet’s view of a penal legal system, both in his contemporary extant structure and in its idealized form. Many of Dante’s characters were put on trial, temporal or divine, for deeds or contemplation, and their destinies were governed by the resulting verdicts. They also routinely negotiated, closed deals, or were otherwise engaged in numerous forms of legal bustle. Dante’s lifelong literary fascination with the life of the law, and even more so with its concealed underbelly, is not surprising, as Steinberg explains, given the poet’s own brush with the law which left him spiritually injured to his last breath. By the end of the 13th century, Florentine political potentates were divided between the so-called “Black Guelphs,” who sided with the papal claim for supremacy in both temporal and spiritual matters, and their opponents, the “White Guelphs,” who recognized the Holy See’s supremacy in matters of the soul, but insisted on civic autonomy in the residual affairs of state. Dante was appointed “prior,” a high official in Florence, by the ruling “Whites,” in which capacity he showed some severity against “Black” opponents; but in 1301, the “Black” faction, assisted by the bayonets of Charles of Valois, brother of Philip IV of France, stormed the city, and then immediately brought charges against many of their adversaries, including Dante, for alleged crimes of corruption. Dante was forced to flee the city and was sentenced in absentia to banishment and later to death. For the rest of his life he roamed the land, considering himself a blameless exile and a wronged victim of a bogus system of law. The Commedia was written in this post-exilic phase of his life. A central theme in Steinberg’s monograph is that Dante’s masterpiece ought to be interpreted as the poet’s attempt to purge his marred reputation and to deliver a few blows back, at both his tormentors ad hominem and their corrupt image of justice in rem. Steinberg’s main contention is that Dante’s desperate attempt to even the score generated in him a jurisprudential commitment to the concept of the “exception.” This elusive concept, which was made famous in recent history by the theoretical work of Carl Schmitt, holds that the authority of law dwells in spheres that