Daniel Berrigan’s The Trial of the Catonsville Nine as Mini-jurisprudence

Abstract

Although the inherent similarity between trial and drama is highly acknowledged among different scholarly fields, in particular among legal and literary scholars, a dramatic work can better speak some critical events and their corresponding legal cases. This is further observed in documentary drama whose fact-based trial form has the capacity not only to comment on or criticize legal history but also the power to reconfigure it. In this paper, one will expose how Berrigan’s play serves as a mini- jurisprudence, challenging and exceeding the logic of the court of law and this by triumphing one major tenet in legal theory which is natural law theory’s principles or ethics.