On Literary Jurisprudence

Abstract

Legal education is a subject of constant debate and reflection. This is a good thing. The past, present, and future of legal education should be a matter of ongoing critical contemplation.1 And it should be controversial, even heated. Teachers of law, and students indeed, should care about legal education. The prospect of what is commonly termed a ‘liberal’ legal education tends to loom large in these conversations on both sides of the Atlantic. In this context, the rise of interdisciplinary and contextual legal studies is surely one of the defining characteristics of a modern legal education. ‘Law and’ courses are everywhere; law and politics, law and economics, law and society, law and history, law and gender, to name but a few of the more common.2 The purpose of this essay is to present a defence of another of these more commonly encountered, consciously interdisciplinary approaches to legal education; and this is ‘law and literature.’ The first part of the essay will provide an overview of ‘law and literature’ scholarship, and its prospective ‘strategies.’ 3 The second will then focus more closely upon one of these strategies: the ability of the literary text to provide a supplementary chronicle with which we might be better equipped to understand the historical and evolutionary nature of particular disciplines and sub-disciplines of law.