ABSTRACT
What kind of cultural and political leverage can legal fictions or personifications exert when they appear in fictional narratives? Perhaps no form of legal personhood has played a greater role in political crises than the “corpus” summoned by the writ of habeas corpus. This chapter examines how the habeas corpus judicial process produces a particular sort of legal personification, the corpus, combining an individual human body with a form of legal personhood. Focusing on the famous Ex parte Somerset decision of 1772 in juxtaposition to William Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams (1794), it shows that a remedial judicial process such as habeas corpus—and its fictionalization by novelists—provides a new vantage on the history of human rights, particularly in respect to the protection of dissidents, the enslaved, or the disenfranchised from private or governmental coercion.
