Love Poetry and the Art of Advocacy (original) (raw)

The Continuing Relevance of Ars Poetica to Legal Scholarship and the Modern Lawyer

International Journal for the Semiotics of Law - Revue internationale de Sémiotique juridique, 2010

In this late modern era within which the basic values of life have been reordered (driven by globalisation, the corporate agenda and mass communication technologies), the individual has effectively been reduced to a mere abstraction. It might be argued that the rational, moral and humanistic concept of freedom has, to a great extent, been compromised by a consequent crisis within the intelligentsia. These groups, in particular the gatekeepers of a classical liberal approach to legal scholarship, are caught between the twin evils of increased unreflective populism and pragmatism evident within many law schools and modern legal institutions. Although a contested term, defenders of the 'socio-legal' tradition, who place the humanities at the heart of legal research and education, are obliged to restate with increased determination the utility of the liberal arts and literature to the law profession and wider legal community. In a normative environment, law and narrative are inextricably linked and narrative poetry is not only invaluable to explaining the origins and location of the legal tradition, but also elicits a mode of understanding which transcends the boundaries of narrowlydefined legal hermeneutics-which often only addresses issues of an operational nature. French novelist Flaubert claimed ''chaque notaire porte en soi les débris d'un poète'' (Flaubert in Madame bovary (trans: Wall, G.), Penguin Classics, London, 1960: 269), paraphrased by American civil rights lawyer, Clarence Darrow, as ''inside every lawyer is the wreck of a poet'' (Lukas in Big trouble: a murder in a small western town sets off a struggle for the soul of America, Simon & Schuster, New York, 1997: 323). In an age of disenchantment, this paper explores the poetic form as an important medium within which to understand the nature and function of law in a society of differentiated individuals.

Introduction: Towards a Legal Poetics

2017

Poetry is the representation and expression of life. Wilhelm Dilthey, "Goethe and the Poetic Imagination" (1910) 1 James Boyd White is one of the few scholars who have made the connection between poetry and law consistently in their work but, in this respect, have had little impact on the field at large; see, for instance, his chapter "The Judicial Opinion and the Poem: Ways of Reading, Ways of Life" in Heracles' Bow (1985) and his essay "Imagining the Law" (1994). Lenora Ledwon's textbook Law and Literature (1996) engages poetry similarly to The Legal Imagination. For studies in poetry see also Barbara Johnson's work, for example, "Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion" (1986) and, more recently, Kieran Dolin's exploration of poetry and law in "Introduction to Law and Literature: Walking the Boundary with Robert Frost and the Supreme Court" (2007). 2 The underrepresentation of poetry in studies of Law and Literature has been commented on-yet not remedied-by a number of scholars, including Johnson in "Anthropomorphism in Lyric and Law" (1998) and Grey in "Steel Against Intimation: The Motive for Metaphor of Wallace Stevens, Esq." (1990; in particular 231-32); Eberle and Grossfeld have offered an overview of possible relations between "Law and Poetry" (2005), yet only implicitly make the claim that this presents a lacuna in the field. We should note here that our observations on the exclusion of poetry from Law and Literature are made from the perspective of our familiarity with the U.S.-American side of the field and may, hence, not entirely apply to Western European practices of Law and Literature. As Greta Olson and Martin Kayman have suggested, Law and Literature scholars in the UK may be turning more frequently to poetry than their U.S.-American counterparts; see also Greta Olson's essay in this issue.

The Turn to Passion: Has Law and Literature become Law and Affect?

Law & Literature, 2016

Affect, this essay argues, has replaced literature as the other of law in law and literature. It begins with a survey of the influence of affect theory in posthumanism, queer theory, history, sociology, the new materialism, and narratology, arguing that "affect"an umbrella term that describes assemblages of nodes, waves, materials, and intensitieshas replaced Foucauldian "discourse" as the leading term in current critical commentary. The consequences of this affective turn for law and literature scholarship and conceptions of legal personhood are then explored. Whereas a more traditional view proposes that law's task is to mediate humans' worst passions and sublate affectively particular conflicts, newer work contends that law is a source of pain rather than its antidote. This entails an end to law and literature as we have known it. Examples of alternative justice offered through literary narratives are now deemed less productive in querying legalist prescription than non-linguistic and non-narratively constructed phenomena. Literature's function of providing "a narrative supplement" to the law has been displaced by anti-narrative explorations of the visual, the haptic, and the experiential that demonstrate law's hidden emotionality and its use of emotional tropes towards ideological ends. This brings text-and linguistic-based law-andliterature work into radical question.

Law and the Poetic Imagination

The poetic imagination is what brings sustainable worlds of meaning into existence. It is also what maintains or destroys or transforms them. In more recent times, the impressive clout of scientific rationality and utilitarian calculation have tended to overshadow the role and authority of stories and feelings. This imbalance stands in need of correction. So if this lecture is a defense of law and the poetic imagination, or of law and the humanities let us say, it is also a quest for recognition. We need to give the humanities their due. I say this not for the sake of the humanities, beleaguered though they may be, but for law’s sake, for the sake of law’s humanity perhaps. It is the business of the poetic imagination to crystallize and manage the way our emotions respond to others and the world around us in the process of drawing meaning from experience.

What's Love Got to do with Lawyers? Thoughts on Relationality, Love, and Lawyers' Work

Rob Vischer has written an elegant and thought-provoking book, in which he asserts convincingly that something is very wrong with the legal profession and lawyers today and supplies an innovative and intriguing, albeit not fully realised, alternative vision. In doing so, moreover, Vischer joins Brad Wendel in authoring a pathbreaking book as part of a 'new generation' of scholars that seeks to build on the success in influencing the academy-and to learn from the failure to persuade practising lawyers-of an earlier generation of leading thinkers, including