From Harvard Magazine, December 10 (January|February issue):
The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens changed the course of legal history. Here’s why it’s been fodder for countless classroom debates.
In the fall of my first year at Harvard Law School, my roommate and I threw a “come as your favorite case or legal doctrine” Halloween party. Our Hastings Hall dorm room was filled with law students dressed as a motley crew of criminals and tortfeasors (and one “fertile octogenarian,” embodying an obscure legal presumption from trust and estates law). Among the partygoers was my roommate, Paul Engelmayer ’83, J.D. ’87, who tied ketchup-covered raw chicken drumsticks around his neck. He had come as Thomas Dudley, an English captain who was put on trial for murder in 1884 because, after a shipwreck, with no food in his lifeboat, he decided that the only way to survive was to kill and eat the cabin boy.
That Halloween party image stayed with me over the years, and it led me to write a book about The Queen v. Dudley and Stephens, the case in which Dudley and his mate were tried for murder. It is fitting that the origins of the book, Captain’s Dinner: A Shipwreck, an Act of Cannibalism, and a Murder Trial That Changed Legal History, lie on the Harvard campus. After all, Dudley and Stephens—one of the most famous cases in Anglo-American law—has long had a strong connection to the University. Many Law School alumni will remember it from first-year criminal law, and Harvard College graduates might know it from “Justice,” one of the College’s most popular courses. The case has been dissected in the Harvard Law Review more than once, by some of America’s leading legal thinkers.
Dudley and Stephens is, as I like to say, Harvard’s favorite cannibalism case. And it’s as relevant today as ever....
....MUCH MORE
Possibly also of interest:
"That time the Dutch ate their prime minister"
Questions America Wants Answered: Is Eating Lab Grown Human Flesh Cannibalism?
"Bite Me: An evolutionary case for cannibalism
"French cannibal Jeremy Rimbaud escapes psych ward, attacks woman"
There's a headline you don't want to see more than about once in a lifetime....
News You Can Use: "In a Heated Negotiation? Try Eating Like Your Opponent"
I initially misread the headline as "Try eating your opponent" an error I
ascribe to the current political climate and the memory of Alferd
Packer, Colorado's most famous cannibal, about whom the sentencing judge said:
"Stand up yah voracious man-eatin' sonofabitch and receive yir sintince. When yah came to Hinsdale County, there was siven Dimmycrats. But you, yah et five of 'em, goddam yah. I sintince yah t' be hanged by th' neck ontil yer dead, dead, dead, as a warnin' ag'in reducin' th' Dimmycratic populayshun of this county. Packer, you Republican cannibal, I would sintince ya ta hell but the statutes forbid it."
This is not the first time Alferd has graced our pages. He was an endnote to 2015's "Trapped In the Snow With That Brother-In-Law Who Won't Stop Talking? Consider the Cannibal Lifestyle" where we pointed out the University of Colorado-Boulder student center was home to the Alferd Packer Restaurant & Grill.
One final note on Alferd:In 1993 Trey Parker and Matt Stone, while studying at UC-Boulder, wrote and produced
"Cannibal, The Musical".
They subsequently created South Park, a series about a little town in Colorado.
