Mining the Law/Literature Enterprise

Abstract

Binder, Gyora, and Robert Weisberg, 2000. Literary Criticisms of the Law. Princeton: Princeton University Press. xv + 539 pp. Amsterdam, Anthony G., and Jerome Bruner, 2000. Minding the Law. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 291 pp. Dershowitz, Alan M. 2000. The Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice that Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law. New York: Warner Books. xii + 259 pp. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. 2000. Testimony and Advocacy in Victorian Literature, and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xvi + 192pp. College Literature has provided updating reviews of new books in law and literature (1999, 26.2; 1994, 21.2) as well as a special issue on the topic of law and literature (1998, 25.1).The present review continues this service with four new books, representing only a limited part of a range of works that continue to issue forth in this field. For example, two recent books that this reviewer would have liked to consider in depth, had time and space allowed, are Maria Aristodemou's Law and Literature: Journeys from Here to Eternity and Patricia Ewing and Susan S. Silbey's The Common Place of Law: Stories from Everyday Life. Aristodemou reminds us that stories, or myths, themselves acted as law in earlier times and that fictionality is itself a large part of law. She does so in chapters devoted to exemplary readings of individual works that range from Sophocles's Oedipus Rex, Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, and Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights to Albert Camus's The Outsider, Angela Carter's The Bloody Chamber, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold, and Jorge Luis Borges's Dream Harder. That she does so with a particular focus on the representation of women is yet another reason why her work holds interest. Her retellings rebirth feeling in the law, reaching out to others, the cyclical rather than the linear, and, as Aristodemou puts it in her analysis of Ariadne and the Minotaur, new entrances to the legal labyrinth. Ewick and Silbey's work, by contrast, presents a fresh reading for a wholly different reason. This book grew out of a New Jersey Supreme Court Task Force request to address minority concerns and racial discrimination in the law. Looking at the differential use and impact of the law, stories of everyday experience emerged as a fresh point of departure as well as an opportunity to look in on the law from the eye view of the proverbial fly on the wall. Having approached their study from the point of view of legal consciousness and self-identity, they present the everyday stories and understandings of people who experience the law. Stories become a mode of inquiry and analysis for those who must live the law or act from within it. We are thus offered chapters that read the social construction, confusion, and contradiction of the law from Before the Law, With the Law, and Against the Law.1 As an interdisciplinary field, law and literature has attracted works that break through narrow disciplinary perspectives to demonstrate the many ways in which law and literature interface or otherwise comment on one another. The works considered for review here must in some way have earned themselves a place in law and literature classrooms because they play in the interstices between disciplines or because they otherwise bust predictable boundaries and open new ways of seeing and knowing about the ways law and literature can mean in relation to or in resistance against each other. The centerpiece of this review essay is Gyora Binder and Robert Weisberg's massive tome of over 500 pages of theory (the fact that it is a book on theory makes its own contribution to the sense of the work's massiveness). Literary Criticisms of the Law breaks each of its chapters into two sections: one on literary theory and one on its application to legal studies. Hermeneutics, narrative criticism, rhetorical criticism, deconstructive criticism, and cultural criticism each have their own chapter, some (hermeneutics) more evenly balanced than others, some (narrative and rhetoric) with double the emphasis on literary theory, and some (deconstructive and cultural criticism) with a much stronger sense of the applications to the law. …