The Devil is in the (Legal) Details (Patreon)

Chapter Three: The Trial of Sabrina Spellman

As far as TV adaptations of the short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” go this is probably my favorite. Stephen Vincent Benét wrote the story in 1936 to satirize Civil War era statesman Daniel Webster. In “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” popular speaker and actual real person Daniel Webster takes up the legal defense of the doomed Jabez Stone who sold his soul to the Devil for unnaturally good luck. Webster, as he was famed for in life, gives the oration that sways a jury of damned souls to commit to releasing Stone from his infernal contract, despite that not being entirely within the letter of the law. It’s been just shy of 90 years since Benét wrote his story and while the political landscape has shifted greatly, the arcane nature of law remains the same. 

What was once a straight sale, a soul for good fortune or crops, for example, is now an embroiled legal battle. Later adaptations of folkloric soul-selling added in a legalistic element as courts of law entered popular consciousness. No longer was the Devil out to trade souls, it was now a contractual agreement full of legalese, loopholes, and tricks. The Devil was a conman looking to foist a one sided contract onto an unsuspecting oaf and everyone else was looking to put one over on Old Scratch. 

So much of our contemporary condition is bound up in these Faustian legal bargains. As Jon and I discussed on our Drag Me to Hell episode, mortgage is a loanword from the French for “a deal with the dead.” There is a persistent subconscious gothic impulse in the gothic to confront the idea that our legal system is phantasmal and while it may seem concrete and binding, it is more haunting than corporeal. In this vein, CAoS tells the same story as “The Devil and Daniel Webster.” 

Sabrina, like Jabez Stone, only survives their trial by proximity to privilege. Stone had the dumb luck of being able to win a famous lawyer and statesman to his side while Sabrina is, effectively, the daughter of the former satanic Pope—not to mention that she is of personal interest to Satan himself. Stories like this abound. Countless wealthy, or otherwise privileged, people have gotten off lightly for all manner of crimes while those on the receiving end of oppression have their lives stripped away for the most petty of offenses. This is the kind of cryptic and ephemeral nature to which the Gothic is naturally draw. 

CAoS, just like “The Devil and Daniel Webster,” focuses on this Gothic transience inherent in our legal systems. Benét’s short story touches on several thematic elements, but as far as the court case is concerned it is about jury nullification. Jury nullification is a unique twist in the American legal system where a jury doesn’t need to actually consider the evidence when giving a verdict. That is to say, they can deem an obviously guilty party “innocent.” Benét used this to satirize Webster who famously lost a presidential bid after a jury used jury nullification to free a fugitive slave he was trying to convict. (It’s worth noting that jury nullification has also been used to free people guilty of lynchings.) Likewise, Sabrina finds herself trapped, like the ball in Pong, being bounced between the shadowing workings of the Dark Lord and the strictures of the Church of Night. 

Sabrina relies, like Jabez Stone, on the fact that the law isn’t quite. Unlike immutable and universal laws like gravity, the legal law is relative, spectral. In an earlier episode Sabrina watches in terror and shock as a witch is eaten alive by the coven. We know, however, that because Sabrina was born into privilege, not to mention plot armor, this will never meaningfully happen to her. What is stone and unmoving for another witch is distant and ephemeral for Sabrina. 

The Gothic nature of the legal system is as such. Like the binding of a lesser demon, we are held accountable to and by intangible systems. The rules of which are not nearly as fixed and reliable as we might wish or hope—they aren’t even as fixed or reliable as demonology. Ironically, this is something CAoS explores in season two. The Demons in the show are strictly bound by the witch or witches who draw their sigils and summon them. They don’t have the ability to contort their bindings in the same way as our occulted legal systems. The “rules” of magic and magical systems are clear even when they are convoluted and occult where as the explicit rules of our legal system are ephemeral, Gothic.