Legal Scholarship as Spectacular Failure

NyUL Rev., 1985

This short essay considers the different ways in which law professors and English professors teach courses in Law and Literature -- particularly the differences in the course materials and the analytic approaches used in understanding those materials. Courses taught on law faculties generally include fewer readings drawn from case law and legal theory. On the other hand, courses taught in English departments are more likely to emphasize similarities between the legal readings and works of fiction or drama. I discuss some of the disciplinary habits that make it difficult for faculty members in each area to come to terms with materials taken from another discipline, but I end by arguing that these barriers are not insurmountable and can even be addressed, to some extent, by focusing on analytical habits already available in the home discipline.

Liverpool Law Review, 2013

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.

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...

From the article: Some of the central issues addressed in the Mercer Law School Symposium on Legal Writing involved questions about the scholarship potential of the discipline of legal writing. Those on the fringe of the academy, as legal writing professors are now and as clinicians were in the sixties, often offer the clearest perspective on it, and, in the case of the legal academy, on the practice itself. What scholarship, I wondered as I listened to the speakers, would best take advantage of this privileged perspective and of legal writing’s necessary focus on rhetoric? There are at least two ways of approaching this question, both of which I want to use here, and these two ways can be related one to the other as I will try to do here as well. The first is to wonder what subjects for the discipline are most naturally generated by teaching it. Here, I will pursue this approach immodestly by trying to display how my own recent scholarship could have naturally arisen (and to some e...

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 ...

Journal of Legal Philosophy

Law and Humanities

This special section of Law and Humanities focuses on the 45th anniversary edition of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination: a book that was groundbreaking when it first appeared in 1973 (since it is generally credited as having initiated the 'law and literature' movement) and that remains a hugely important resource today. White's approach to legal scholarship and education-reading law's instruments, its rhetoric and concepts alongside, above, below and in-between literary works and criticism-opened up a new world of intellectual possibilities. Realization of these possibilities has come in the form of the growth and flourishing, not only of law and literature but also numerous other intersections of law and the humanities that owe a debt to White. This symposium brings together seven eminent scholars (and readers of The Legal Imagination) to reflect on the contribution that White's book made and continues to make to law and humanities education and scholarship.

2013