Jessie Allen is a writer and law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Before coming to legal academia, she was a voting rights lawyer and before that a performance artist. Her essays have appeared in journals such as the Houston Law Review, Journal of Law and Courts, Emotions: History, Culture, Society, the Tulane Law Review, and Dissent. Her work also appears in multi-author collections like Porosites Du Droit / Law’s Porosities, edited be Vivian Curran.
In the 1980-1990s, she wrote and performed a series of solo and group pieces at downtown New York City venues, including Threadwaxing Space, Poetry Project at St. Marks, Downtown Art Co., and Franklin Furnace, as well as clubs like 8BC, Cat Club, Pyramid Club, and Limbo Lounge.
At MacDowell, Allen worked on a book mixing memoir and legal analysis to explore a famous old legal treatise, Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Law of England. While Commentaries is likely the most famous law book ever written, practically no one actually reads it. Lawyers – and Supreme Court justices – often cherry-pick quotes to support their arguments. Allen reimagines Blackstone’s impatient, joyful vision of a legal system that draws meaning and legitimacy from ordinary people’s lives while connecting the 260-year-old text to the issues of our times.
Alongside Fellow April Dembosky, Allen presented during a MacDowell Downtown event while in residence.
