Reading the Intersections of Law and Literature in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

During its twenty-five year history, field of law and literature has attracted scholars from both law schools and English departments, generated dozens of excellent monographs, and spawned several academic journals. One key journal, Law and Literature-published as Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature from 1989 to 2001-describes field in highly interdisciplinary terms on its website, suggesting that the [law-and-literature] movement, which extols law-related literature and literary value of legal documents, provides a unique perspective on how law and literature are mutually enlightening. Despite this very real interdisciplinarity, law schools and English departments do approach combined study of law and literature differently. For legal scholars, tendency is to focus chiefly on textuality of law, using insights from literary theory to question and complicate claims for hegemony of legal discourse in a variety of situations. The focus on law as literature differentiates this approach from methods used by literary scholars, who focus mainly on law in literature-sometimes in a simple representational way (think Bleak House), but more often in a broad-based historicist way, ranging from study of role of law in print culture to more explicitly new historicist studies of how reinterpreting legal texts creates new frameworks for understanding literary ones.