Nicholas McBride (University of Cambridge – Faculty of Law) has posted James Joyce as a Great Irish Christian Jurist (in McIlroy (ed), Christianity and the Making of Irish Law: Violence, Virtue and Reason (Routledge, 2025)) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
This chapter explores how James Joyce used his novels to consider the relationship between justice and mercy at both a divine and secular level. Both Ulysses and Finnegans Wake are centrally concerned to establish the conditions under which human beings (in Ulysses, flawed, and in Finnegans Wake, evil) could be offered mercy by a loving God, while being uneasily aware that such mercy might, and perhaps must, be denied by a just God. The lessons Joyce teaches us as to how justice and mercy might be reconciled have much to teach us when we consider how to reconcile the twin needs to be merciful and just when administering the law.
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Lawrence Solum