Law, Literature, and the Celebration of Authority (original) (raw)
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This encyclopedia entry provides an historical overview of the law and literature movement. It discusses the involvement of lawyers in American literature in the antebellum period, interest in judicial rhetoric and philosophy of language among progressive era legal theorists, and the turn to literary theory among American constitutional theorists and critical legal scholars during the late twentieth century. The emergence of law and literature movements in the U.K. and on the continent are also briefly discussed. Authors discussed include Ronald Dworkin, Stanley Fish, Peter Goodrich, Martha Nussbaum, Richard Weisberg, Brook Thomas, Robert Weisberg, Robin West, and J.B. White.
Literary Analysis of Law: Reorienting the Connections Between Law and Literature
Critical Analysis of Law
This special issue on the New Literary Analysis of Law features articles that dispense with the choice between “law in literature” and “law as literature,” to ask how legal and literary forms, methods, concepts, and attitudes can be productively explored in tandem. Conventionally, when scholars ask how legal actors and problems are portrayed in literature, or how hermeneutic theory may shed light on statutory or constitutional interpretation, these questions are meant to help solve a legal problem, at a doctrinal or conceptual level. But once we abandon the requirement that literature serve as an assistant in this fashion, many new possibilities for the literary study of law come into visibility. The essays in this special issue explore some of those directions.
Literature and Law: Mirrors facing each other
International Journal of Humanities and Social Science
I. INTRODUCTION Literature and law though being separate branches of social sciences share some proximity and amalgamate in objectives. Literature tends towards abstraction, creativity, variety in description and narration and is abundant in genres. Law on the other hand tends towards clarity, logical interpretation scope, definite pattern and style of drafting and is varied in branches. " The relationship between law and literature is rich and complex. In the past three and half decades, the topic has received much attention from literary critics and legal scholars studying modern literature. Ever since the publication of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination in 1973, there have been numerous books and articles studying the role of law in the plays of Shakespeare or the novels of Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka and Camus. Some writers have studied works of literature from jurisprudential perspective; others have applied the tools of literary analysis to legal texts such as ...
Literature and Law: A Study on the Intersection of Literary Narratives and Legal Systems
Samdarshi ISSN: 2581-3986 Vol 16 Issue 2 (July 2023), 2023
The relationship between law and literature has long been a subject of interest to scholars from diverse fields. While law provides a framework for societal governance, literature serves as a reflection of cultural and social norms. This paper explores the intersection of law and literature and critically analyses the role of literature in shaping legal discourse and vice versa. The paper argues that literature serves as an important tool for understanding and critiquing the law, while the law influences the themes and content of literature. The paper also examines the historical evolution of law and literature and highlights key debates surrounding the relationship between the two disciplines. Using case studies from various literary works, the paper analysis the ways in which literature engages with legal themes and the extent to which literature can contribute to legal scholarship.
Literary ( In ) Justice An Interview With
2013
I cannot claim to be one of the founding scholars in law and literature—for an explanation of how law and literature as a ‘movement’ arose, there are accounts of this to be found, particularly in relation to the American scene—with Benjamin Cardozo, for example, making explicit acknowledgement of writers as fundamental sources of understanding in law and implicitly of law itself. More recently, James Boyd White in the 1970’s in recognizing the link between the worlds of law and of literature both as a source of analogous narrative models and in the shared investment in critical, deconstructive processes. Later commentary has recognized law and literature as just one aspect of the larger ‘critical legal studies’ movement, claiming the political agenda of exposing the impossibility of neutrality and law as essentially political. However, I feel rather resistant to the categorizing tendency—of sourcing a ‘history’ or a ‘movement’ or even a ‘discipline’ of law and literature. For exampl...
American Legal argumentation: The Law and Literature/rhetoric movement
Argumentation, 1995
This essay discusses the most recent manifestations of the debate of the law and literature movement. The essay traces the evolution of the Law and Literature schools and identifies some of their adherents and conclusions, shows how these schools have influenced the conceptual development and teaching of American law, presents connections between the Critical Legal Studies and Law and Economics movements in the U.S., and raises questions about the Law and Literature movement. KEY WORDS: law and literature, critical legal studies, law and economics, teaching law, and argumentation. I. INTRODUCTION Lawyers, especially law professors, have a love/hate relationship with literature and rhetoric. On one hand, lawyers love to recall and quote some of the most famous passages of advocacy and judicial prose. Past United States Supreme Court Justices Benjamin Cardozo and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., for example, are revered not only for their analytical skills, but also for the power of the prose that expressed their analysis. Yet, on the other hand, lawyers disparage stylistic excess and 'emotive appeal,' which is perceived to be divorced from 'analysis or reasoned argument' (Farber and Sherry, 1993, p. 849). This conflict over the nature and proper use of legal argumentation reflects one of the oldest philosophical debates recorded by Western civilization, that between philosophy and rhetoric, which began in ancient Greece where legal education was the training of the citizen and fell under the rubric of rhetoric (Kennedy, 1980). However, today, unlike ancient Greece, citizens represent all possible combinations of races, colors, cultures, genders, sexual orientations and physical abilities. Now that multicultural lawyers have joined the fray, the tension has reached new heights between those who see literature and rhetoric as deceitful or subversive influences in the law and their opponents who see literature and rhetoric as liberating and truth-creating. This essay discusses the most recent manifestation of this debate, the 'Law and Literature' movement and its critics. The label 'Law and Literature' is misleading for two reasons. First, it is difficult to define 'movements' and identify 'schools' in the legal academy; as soon as one
The Poetics of the Pragmatic: What "Literary Criticisms of Law" Offers Posner
Stanford Law Review, 2001
Is it practical to evaluate law aesthetically, as if it were a kind of literature? In reviewing Literary Criticisms of Law,' Judge Richard Posner argues that it is not instrumentally useful to view law as a kind of literature. 2 He thereby reasserts his long-held position that law should be evaluated economically rather than aesthetically.' In this response, I argue that Posner's pragmatism requires that he evaluate law aesthetically, if he wishes to evaluate it at all. Famous as a tireless promoter of conservative law and economics, Judge Posner has more recently restyled himself as an equally energetic exponent of "pragmatism," 4 thereby placing himself in the unlikely company of such progressive social critics as Richard Rorty, Cornel West, Margaret Radin, and Stanley Fish. 5 This has been a welcome development. Pragmatism is an appealingly flexible doctrine that makes the test of any action or belief the difference it makes in practice. Pragmatism asks us to compare the * Professor of Law, State University of New York at Buffalo. Thanks are owed to Robert Weisberg, George Kannar, and Jim Wooten for helpful suggestions.
“A Connectivity of Law and Literature: A Legal Profession”
2016
In the age of globalization, literature works as a gateway for the legal academicians. Therefore information about legal space is crucial. To get into these legal spaces, law professors have to turn to narratives to understand how legal and law system functions. Law in literature is now an established jurisprudential discipline. Law and literature have an important feature in common: they both require the medium of language to exist. This paper explores the links between law and literature as distinctive but overlapping disciplines and focuses on lawyer/writer in particular. The paper investigates the various intersections between legal influences, law, justice, power and authority. The paper discusses in a broad sense the link between law and literature, with a particular focus on law in literature and the relationship between legal and literary form.
The Letter of the Law: Literature, Justice and the Other
2013
This book combines legal as well as political and theoretical questions in a variety of contexts, ranging from legal issues in the early modern period to critical explorations of law/s, justice and textuality in contemporary literature and culture. The essays in this volume offer critical perspectives on the role of literature and theory in relation to the law and explore otherness and justice in early modern, Victorian and contemporary texts, postmodern theory, colonial and postcolonial contexts and popular culture. Examining how legal and literary narratives construct, repress, legitimise, but also enable the Other, this volume offers new insights into forms of alterity, marginality and exclusion and articulates the imperative need to reconfigure issues of justice as always intertwined with the Other.