ENG 1017 Law and Literature

Human beings live in the realms of physics (nature) as well as nomos (convention). Laws and the legal system constitute nomos, and language, written and oral, underlies them; language and nomos modify and normalize physics. Thus we all have intimate contact with the world of language and law from the very beginning of our lives. Writing and law have walked hand-in-hand since the very beginnings of human history. Legal opinions, like novels and films, tell stories, stories about the law and the people, places, and things governed and affected by it; the law, like literature, is dependent on narratives as the carriers of the ethics of collective living. It follows then that all who practice law must necessarily also be readers, and thus interpreters, not only of words and sentences but also of narratives. Arguably, law is the area that most immediately demonstrates the practical value of reading and interpreting the written word. And literary narratives, like legal narratives, are the trajectories plotted upon the material reality not only realistically, to describe our reality, but also normatively, to normalize it, and perhaps provocatively, in order to change it. This class explores 1) Law in literature: the ways in which great literature has often helped us think about the law, and to ask, what is Justice? What is moral and what is immoral? Literature describes the ethical component in the law, that is, how people relate to each other. 2) Law as literature: jurists must think fundamentally about whether practicing law means interpreting an original mind or intention, or whether it means garnering norms from living texts, and also whether texts/laws mean different things for different communities. When we read a literary text we must ask ourselves similar questions. 3) Topic: these days we often hear the claim, We are a country of laws, implying that there are other kinds of law that run counter to our Enlightenment notion that ?no one stands above the law. We

Credits

3