Benjamin Woodring

Cited in City of Philadelphia v. Sessions and profiled in The Atlantic: https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/06/when-hamlet-starts-showing-up-in-federal-court/562703/

Today’s hotly contested debates about “sanctuary cities” would feel very familiar to someone living in Shakespeare’s London. In this piece, which is part of a larger forthcoming book project titled Shakespeare’s Sanctuary Cities, I argue that Shakespeare is fascinated by the dramatic possibilities inherent in an asylum space situated on the fault line of a jurisdictional battle. A refuge site sits between life and death. At the same time, Elizabethan sanctuary was a contradictory swirl of concepts: something both holy and debauched, something at the same time archaic and unpredictably present. Shakespeare’s use of a sanctuary in The Comedy of Errors is not a simple endorsement of Christian mercy. It is rather a deeper reflection on genre and possibility: comedy is predicated on some escape valve from accumulating conflicts and obligations, while tragedy is ultimately insulated from such releases. Shakespeare creates an asylum episode in this play different from anything in Plautus or Gower, his main sources. The abbey, which jealously defends its sanctuary rights, is a space allowing for recognition and reintegration after long sequences of confusion and chaos. But it is also, I argue, a site for further potential misreadings. The sanctuary in Shakespeare’s play does not provide perfect resolutions. The sanctuary’s Abbess arguably bungles the play’s moral. But in the end, this imperfection is not only vastly preferable to tragedy’s irreversible misunderstandings, it is also a sign of Shakespeare’s nuanced unpacking of a generative social and spatial concept.

Profiling Michael Widener's illustrated law books collection at Yale Law School, and recent associated shows and events (at the Grolier Club in New York and the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign). Reflecting on the relations between law and the visual arts, from medieval/early modern times to the present.

In revision for publication.  Originally, Harvard Doctoral Dissertation, Department of English 2014. Committee: Stephen Greenblatt, Homi K. Bhabha, James Simpson

Abstract:
This study weaves together several strands of inquiry. On the level of dramatic analysis, I look to understand how "sanctuary" spaces operate in Shakespeare's early plays and the ways in which such zones relate to genre. In tragedy, there is no escape valve, no place for retreat. The aesthetic depends on the increasing pressure and the gradual winnowing of options and possibilities. I analyze Richard III (both Thomas More's and Shakespeare's) as the preeminent example of sanctuary-breaking and generic claustrophobia. In Shakespearean comedy, on the other hand, sanctuaries allow action to continue, brokering resolutions while avoiding tragic termination. In this vein I consider The Comedy of Errors and As You Like It. The second strand is historical: I attempt to situate the plays within the larger context of England’s immunity spaces in their twilight. I document the upheaval and confusion regarding refuge sites following the Reformation and the dissolution of the monasteries, contending that the conflicting swirl of concepts surrounding Elizabethan sanctuary – as something both holy and debauched – made it ripe for Shakespeare’s fascination. Finally, in the epilogue I offer a more theoretical reading of sanctuary practices over time, arguing that asylum is often a tool for young or relatively unstable governments to get subjects to present themselves. In this view, sanctuaries are not exceptional spaces outside diurnal affairs and authority, but rather the precise cohesive principle that keeps a fledgling jurisdictional structure intact. Nevertheless, I argue that alternative modes of access to the tools of the administrative culture within which one is unavoidably entrenched may ultimately be more profound than the utopian wish for escape.

Much ink has recently been spilled on the question of what a party’s denunciation of ICSID entails. But what happens when a state makes another notification (like the announcing of a pro futuro ‘exhaustion of local remedies’ requirement) at the same time as the notice of denunciation? I argue that Ecuador’s 2009 ICSID denunciation essentially has an Article 26 notification bundled within. Despite the frenzy of academic speculation on denunciation issues, this curious provision has received virtually no attention. I first give an overview of the three schools of thought on denunciation and consent -- Schreuer’s “offer and acceptance” model, Manciaux’s intermediate model, and the enduring BIT model -- outlining their mechanics, their adherents, and their objections. I then discuss Ecuador’s notice of denunciation cum notice of local remedy exhaustion in relation to past awards and greater contextual treaty considerations. Then I run the Ecuador hybrid notification scenario through each of the three models, pointing up areas where application becomes thorny or admits of multiple readings. I conclude with an assessment of the most plausible reading and discuss final considerations of the topic’s importance, including a call for greater transparency in ICSID summaries of unconventional communications from states.

I focus on the increasingly well-known immigrant speech, or “the stranger’s case,” in the play Sir Thomas More, widely agreed to be in Shakespeare’s hand. In its depiction of “Evil May Day” in 1517, Sir Thomas More stands before the gates of St. Martin Le Grand sanctuary space—home to a thriving migrant labor community—and dissuades xenophobic rioters from entering.

This passage has recently received extensive coverage. But no one has yet explored thoroughly its crucial sanctuary dimensions. More makes “the stranger’s case” at St. Martin’s threshold, a privileged zone protecting those taking formal sanctuary, and many foreigners (sometimes refugees) practicing their craft exempt from oppressive municipal and guild regulation. I read the speech and play in deep historical context, discussing sanctuary-dwelling immigrant communities through leases (in Westminster Abbey’s Muniments Library), crown licenses, and patents. I also make use of Shannon McSheffrey’s ongoing pioneering research.

The stranger’s case’s hypothetical energy—envisioning one’s own possible future as a stranger—was very much in England’s cultural bloodstream. Drawing on archival research, I analyze sixteenth-century legal and political defenses of sanctuary that employ proleptic and substitutional logics similar to More’s plea. More’s speech offers a key to understanding Londoners’ long-conflicting orientations toward sanctuary.

The stranger’s case emblematizes Shakespeare’s imaginative enterprise: to inhabit roles of others, to trade places. It is no coincidence that a sanctuary, foregrounded in the play, explicitly allows for this quintessential work of the theatre. The refuge protects other people, other possibilities, other plots. But Shakespeare emphasizes asylum’s vulnerability: it must be defended. Sanctuary’s boundaries here are ultimately only as strong as More’s speech. Sanctuary and drama mutually implicate and protect one another—extra-jurisdictional space is to thank for English theatre; drama, in turn, comes full circle to make the case for the specialness of such exempt spaces.