Drawing upon Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the dialogic, this essay explores the production of legal meanings about criminal responsibility in the 19th and early 20th centuries. In particular, 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, and in the 1906 trial of Harry K. Thaw for the murder of Stanford White. Meanings about criminal responsibility emerge, I argue, from a process of discursive conflict and negotiation between the domains of legal consciousness and formal law. 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.
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