Prerequisite(s):

None

This course satisfies the legal theory requirement for graduate students.

Teaching method:

Seminar

Method of evaluation:

Undergraduate students

Class participation, responses to readings, and final paper.

Graduate students

Class participation, responses to readings, and final paper (graduate-length publishable paper).

Course objective(s):

This seminar course will draw connections between law and literature, by examining how the legal process and justice is represented in literature, by comparing legal and literary modes of Interpretation, and by considering how law regulates literature. The course looks at different ways of knowing, questioning and judging law and literature, by exploring how law and literature, respectively, interpret, evaluate, and define literature as a legal object and law as a literary subject.

The study of Law and Literature aspires to several goals: using literature to engender sympathy in lawyers and an understanding of difference by entering other people’s stories and points of view and emphasizing emotion and intuition; using literature to bring humanism and ethics in law; using narrative theory to improve writing and analysis and close critical reading; exposing law students to notable, memorable and great writing to improve legal writing and communication with clients and legal institutions; using literary criticism and theory to improve interpretation; using literary techniques such as point of view, narrative theory, and critical theories such as feminism, post-colonialism, and new historicism to illuminate our reading of law and legal texts; studying legal texts, including reasons for judgment, constitutions, statutes and regulations, as literary texts with their own style, rhetorical practices, and generic presuppositions, audience expectations, and interpretive communities; treating the interaction of law and literature as a pedagogical forum for discussion of issues of judgment, justice, punishment, and law; and exposure to persuasive narratives and storytelling.

Interdisciplinary scholarship, as the literary critic Linda Hunt has recommended, should respect the disciplines at the same time as it invites conversation across the disciplinary boundaries. Each group, she writes, must be committed to learn the language of the other, and the “best interdisciplinary work produces its effects back in the various disciplines that it crosses rather than creating an altogether new and different interstitial space.” This course will look at how “law” and “literature” raise different questions about each other and have different approaches for answering those questions. What can law and literature say to each other?  What are the questions each discipline poses? What answers does each discipline provide?  Some questions that the seminar will discuss include, what does law think it knows about literature; what does law want to know about literature; what should law seek to know and to question about literature; what assumptions does the law make about literature that literary experts would question; what expectations do legal professions bring to literary texts; what are the legal assumptions about literary genres and aesthetic norms; what assumptions about law do authors make; and how do law and literature define originality, authorship, and merit? 

Readings will include novels, plays, short stories, poems, cases, and interdisciplinary law and literature scholarship. The course will discuss how legal representation, legal ethics, professionalism, advocacy, justice, the legal process and law reform is evaluated by literature. The readings will raise critical questions about story-telling and narrative within the trial and in literature. The seminar will use narrative and literary theory to examine key legal documents. The course will also look at how law has regulated literature and authors (such as through obscenity and copyright law).

Materials used:

Law and Literature (Univ. of Ottawa, 2009), ed. E. Judge

Schedule:

Monday and Wednesday, 13:00 to 15:00