Law and Literature – a Meaningful Connection (original) (raw)

Law and Literature – New Tendencies Based on the Example of Science Fiction Motifs

Białostockie Studia Prawnicze

This article presents an example of law and literature movement applicability as a phenomenon in legal sciences. It shows the links between law and literature based on the example of the features that are characteristic of literature and, at the same time, are important in the reflection of the philosophy of law and in current law-making practice. This approach is inspired by a cultural approach to legal theory and philosophy (cultural studies of law). The law and literature movement deals with diverse issues in the field of the integration of legal sciences with linguistics and literary theory. The law and literature movement is not novel in the Anglo-Saxon legal culture, as opposed to Polish law science where it is rather new and has recently been gaining in popularity. In this paper, I will try to answer the question of how the law and literature movement and research perspectives originating from this trend could be an inspiration for further use in legal philosophy. This reflec...

Literature Alongside Law as a Contemporary Paradigm

Cultural Dynamics, 2001

This article presents and evaluates two paradigms and their relevance within the law and literature discourse. According to the first one, the global law paradigm, the law appears as a huge web or as a unified and orderly metanetwork, which encompasses human experience in all realms, and provides a normative response for every aspect of it. This paradigm may be set against an alternative perception, the paradigm of literature alongside law. Within the framework of this paradigm, vulnerable parts of the law, some of its false pretences as well as the hidden processes shaping it, are exposed. Next, there is the establishment of both hope and the ability to fulfil it, animated by imagination, shaped by literature and reflected in it, to put things right; to arrive at concrete truths and justice in a reality which does not enable comprehension of the whole, and never abandoning the strife towards the complex and the constantly changing equilibrium between human needs and human limitations.

Law, Literature and Intertextuality

Most of the contemporary scholarships of both literature and law categorize the coincidences and overlaps between an author's literary work and his or her legal career, a given literary period and the same historical era of law and jurisprudence or between innumerable pieces of literature and the texts of the law merely as things of no real interest, curious facts that are not worthy of detailed academic analysis. While a point of view of this kind has its reasons the aim of the following paper is to change this attitude to a certain extent. In my opinion instead of talking about the "death of law and literature" we should consider the possibilites of (re)opening new ways of research for law and literature studies that may provide mutual benefits to both the representatives of legal and literary sciences. Hereinafter I will try to show why and how exploring the intertextual connections between the texts of law and those of literature seems to me the most fruitful endeavour to connect law and literature to each other.

Law and Literature: A Review of Interdisciplinary Literary Texts

2019

This paper explores and recognizes common points of intersection of law and literature. Different literary texts have legal language, court scenes, cross examinations, lawyers, witnesses, judge, and audience. The main focus of this paper is to identify such events from literary texts and also to present instances that people take into the courts from literary texts. Law and literature originate and develop, after all, from the same culture and society. Humanities and social sciences are common grounds of origin and development of law and literature. They are related with each other. They do have correlation on the basis of culture, social norms and values, and humanities. In this paper, they discussed on the grounds of cognitive and behaviouristic aspects of human life.

“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.

Literature? In substitution for legal philosophy? (variations to and uses of “Law and Literature”)

Acta Juridica Hungarica, 2011

Anglo-American and French, as well as German, Spanish and Hungarian variations to "Law and Literature" are surveyed for that as to the nature of the discipline some conclusions can be formulated. Accordingly, "Law and Literature" recalls that which is infinite in fallibility and which is not transparent in its simplicity, that is, the situation confronted that we may not avoid deciding about despite the fact that we may not get to a final understanding. What is said thereby is that "Law and Literature" is just a life-substitute. Like an artificial ersatz, it helps one to see out from what he/she cannot surpass. What it is all about is perhaps not simply bridging the gap between the law's proposition and the case of law, with unavoidable tensions confronting the general and the individual, as well as the abstract and the concrete. Instead, it is more about live meditation, professional methodicalness stepped back in order to gain further perspectives and renewed reflection from a distance, so that the underlying reason for the legal (and especially judicial) profession can be recurrently rethought. In a fictional form, literature is the symbol and synonym of reflected life, a field where genuine human fates can be represented. Thereby, at the same time it is a substitute for theology, rooted in earthly existence as a supply to foster feeling kinds of, or substitutes to, transcendence.

The Reflexivity of Law and of Literature

Law and Literature, 2020

As observed by Hart in the opening lines of The Concept of Law, «few questions concerning human society have been asked with such persistence and answered by serious thinkers in so many diverse, strange, and even paradoxical ways as the question 'What is law?'». The question What is Law? has a profoundly different meaning for a jurist than the question What is Chemistry? for a chemist. The reason is that law would not be possible, it would not even exist, without the question What is Law?. Law, in other words, exists only through the question through which it interpellates itself. Law does not institute itself, it does not exist, outside the question on what it is, on what makes it what it is. A similar claim can be made for literature. Literature is nothing but the question What is Literature?at least since, as observed by Maurice Blanchot, Mallarm e wondered Quelque chose comme les Lettres existe-t-il?: «this question is literature itself» when literature has become a concern for its own essence. It is this reflexive movementsuch that law and literature do not get to institute themselves without the question on themselvesthat must be examined, to indicate the point where their separation, their distance, remains radical".

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 ...