Tom Regnier - 'Hamlet and the Law of Homicide: The Life of the Mind in Law and Art'

What did Shakespeare know about the law? Quite a bit, apparently. The play “Hamlet” demonstrates that Shakespeare was aware of changes that were occurring in the law of homicide in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, particularly the evolution away from the medieval view of law, which focused entirely on a person’s actions, to the modern view, which also takes into account a person’s state of mind.
This legal development paralleled the evolution in Shakespeare’s art: a greater emphasis on the inner life of the character than was seen in earlier literature.
This talk was selected as part of the Dade County Bar Association’s Thurgood Marshall Distinguished Lecture Series and was also presented to the Miami Beach Bar Association and the Weston Bar Association. It was originally presented on September 14, 2014, at the SOF Annual Conference in Madison, Wisconsin. The version of the talk presented here was recorded at ArtServe, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, on May 22, 2017, by George Wentzler.
The late Tom Regnier was an attorney in southern Florida who earned his J.D. summa cum laude at University of Miami School of Law, where he taught for many years as an adjunct professor, and his LL.M. at Columbia Law School, where he was a Harlan F. Stone Scholar. He passed away on April 14, 2020. For more on his remarkable life, see ShakespeareOxfordFellowship.org/regnier-life.
For more on the Shakespeare Authorship Question, visit ShakespeareOxfordFellowship.org.