Bartleby, The Scrivener: “A House Like Me”

George Dargo

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This Article revisits Herman Melville’s  Bartleby, the enigmatic copyist who “prefers not to copy.” The story is a favorite in Law and Literature courses for reasons that defy complete explanation. It is, of course, a “law story” in that it takes place in a mid-nineteenth century law office where the principal character is the lawyer-narrator who runs the office and engages Bartleby. And then there is Bartleby himself, a law copyist who is hired to copy documents in the time-honored fashion in which legal instruments were duplicated in the centuries before our own age of endless duplication. This may help to explain why yet another discussion of Bartleby, the Scrivener belongs in a law journal. The story is part of the law school curriculum and, as such, it is open to interpretation just like any other legal or quasi-legal text that law students may come across in a course of study and that lawyers may encounter in practice.

44 New Eng. L. Rev. 819