Law and literature
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature. This field has roots in two major developments in the intellectual history of law—first, the growing doubt about whether law in isolation is a source of value and meaning, or whether it must be plugged into a large cultural or philosophical or social-science context to give it value and meaning; and, second, the growing focus on the mutability of meaning in all texts, whether literary or legal. Those who work in the field stress one or the other of two complementary perspectives: Law in literature (understanding enduring issues as they are explored in great literary texts) and law as literature (understanding legal texts by reference to methods of literary interpretation, analysis, and critique).
This movement has broad and potentially far reaching implications with regards to future teaching methods, scholarship, and interpretations of legal texts. Combining literature's ability to provide unique insight into the human condition through text with the legal framework that regulates those human experiences in reality gives a democratic judiciary a new and dynamic approach to reaching the aims of providing a just and moral society. It is necessary, in practical thought and discussion about the use of legal rhetoric, to understand text's role in defining human experience.
History of the movement
Perhaps first to envision the movement were John Wigmore and Benjamin Cardozo, who acknowledged "novelists and poets" as the principal teachers of law in the first half of the 20th century. Most scholars, however, credit James Boyd White as the founder of the law and literature movement because of the dedicated research and distinguished publications he has contributed to this rapidly growing field. Among his many literary books and articles, White's most renowned publication, The Legal Imagination, is often credited with initiating the law and literature movement. This book, first published in 1973, is a fusion of anthology and critique, superficially resembling a traditional legal casebook but drawing on a much wider and more diverse range of sources, with headnotes and questions emphasizing the relationship of legal texts to literary analysis and literary texts to the legal issues that they explore.
The movement began attracting attention in the 1970s and by the 1980s had gained substantial ground in academia. The proponents of the law-in-literature theory, such as Richard Weisberg and Robert Weisberg, believe that literary works, especially narratives centered on a legal conflict, will offer lawyers and judges insight into the "nature of law" that would otherwise go missing in the traditionally strict study of legal rhetoric.
In its early stages, the law and literature movement focused strictly on the law in literature theory; however, beginning in the late 1970s the law as literature perspective began to gain popularity. This perspective seeks to enhance legal studies by examining and interpreting legal texts using the techniques of literary critics. Scholars such as White and Ronald Dworkin find greater relevance in law as literature because it maintains that the meaning of legal texts, such as written law, like any other genre of literature, can only be discovered through interpretation. Although legal scholars have long considered both literary and legal texts in their study of the legal process, the recent degree to which the two seemingly separate genres interact has sparked great debates among scholars.
