ABSTRACT
This chapter explores what Nathaniel Hawthorne does in The House of the Seven Gables; and predicts nothing less than what will become in the next generation – or two, even three or four generations hence, its effects being felt – the principal American school of thought, and that nation's one truly original and enduring contribution to global jurisprudence, legal realism. The reminiscences are memes of legal precedent that the structural embellishments of Karl Llewellyn's house metaphorise; a similitude which transforms the Pyncheons' colonial pile, built on a double act of thieving – not only of the Pyncheons 'nicking' its lot from the Maules, but, presumably, the Maules land-grabbing from those decorative figures adorning the Waldo County map, the 'Indians' – into what the legal realists might call a 'haunted house of law' where all who enter seem doomed to remain, etherealised as spirits, ever seeking its sequestered juridical secret, the lost letter of the law.
