A Review of Stacy G.C. Jernigan, He Watches All My Paths (2019)

Abstract

“Law and Literature” looks beyond statutes, formal rules, and reported cases to assess how fiction and other works of literature reveal popular perceptions of doctrines, practices, and legal institutions at certain times; how fiction represents and illustrates law at work; and how it can show or reflect on legal thought, legal methods, or legal ways of understanding and explaining life. The just-published, first novel by Stacy Jernigan entitled HE WATCHES ALL MY PATHS is a good example for such study.

The author is well known as one of the Bankruptcy Judges for the Northern District of Texas, an office she has held since 2006 after a distinguished career in a “Big Law” firm. Appropriately, the protagonist and narrator of her novel is . . . a bankruptcy judge! The delivery of an anonymous threat on the protagonist’s life triggers everything that happens over the course of a year. Valuable passages muse about the task of judging in bankruptcy cases and about collateral damage in the adversary system of justice.

Non-lawyers will enjoy the fast pace, the suspenseful unfolding of the plot, and the cinematographic descriptions of the Marshals’ feats of protecting the judge from imminent death on two occasions. Furthermore, the reader unfamiliar with bankruptcy will learn a great deal about how this system of the law works. Best of all, bankruptcy lawyers will savor the book with its rich details of the life and work of a bankruptcy judge as she decides cases and as she lives her life, while dealing with the fears and frustrations resulting from the threats of one who seeks to harm her and to strike a blow against the system of bankruptcy law that we know and hold dear.

Keywords: bankruptcy, judging

JEL Classification: K19