Death and Discretion: Some Thoughts on Living

Abstract

Like judges, administrative officials exercise legal authority that significantly impacts the lives of others, and, in doing so, they must confront the problem of authority as "a problem for the individual mind faced with the difficulty of deciding what to do or to say." (James Boyd White, Acts of Hope309 (1994) Their work, like the work of judges, has a profound moral dimension. In this essay, Professor Sullivan considers that moral obligation through an analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro's 2022 film Living, together with Akira Kurosawa's film Ikiru and Leo Tolstoy's novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich. An earlier version of the essay was presented at a Yale  Law School conference in honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of James Boyd White's path-breaking book  The Legal Imagination.

Keywords: , administration, administrative law, law and literature, Ishiguro, Tolstoy, Kurosawa, films, fiction, James Boyd White