ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the production of legal meanings about criminal responsibility in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It examines the honor-based defense of the "unwritten law" as it was articulated in relation to the formal law of provocation in the 19th century. Harry Thaw's trial becomes the materialization of that space in between the unwritten law and the law of homicide, the place where the meeting of domains occurs and is enacted through narrative. At trial, competing narratives of indictment and exoneration literally enact that dynamic process, so that trials may be said to be the materialization of the dialogic production of "law" in its broadest sense. Verdicts and substantive rulings feed back into formal law via common law reasoning and treatise writing even as spectacular trials become points of reference in a broad set of conversations about social norms and relations, cultural codes and nodes of resistance.
