Literature, Law And

Literature as Emotional and Creative

On first encounter, law and literature may seem a rather incongruous marriage of disciplines. Recognizing the role of art as a source of illusion and potential for emotional excess, Plato (428–347 BCE) warned against art and certainly in the interests of justice and truth. The law should avoid illusion and excess as traits. Nevertheless, metaphysical absolutes relied upon by the law, such as notions of justice and truth, may bear scrutiny from contributions throughout the humanities. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1827) famously asserted in Defence of Poetry(1819), “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” Though visions of humanity, liberty, and rights may arise in the legal as well as the poetic or political imagination, Shelley indicated the tendency for art to lead the way in pioneering new challenges to institutional injustices, the anarchic challenge to law being prior to any synergy.

More generally, the world of law, with its concern in cultivating “legal science,” providing practical, consistent, and impartial solutions to human problems, is temperamentally and philosophically at variance with the world of literature. That world is committed to creativity, variety, the emotive and artistic, and providing an element of “surprise”—an aim entirely opposed to the aims of the law. Nevertheless, the two fields share much common ground—using the instruments of language and rhetoric and exploring issues of justice, truth, evidence, rights, and values. Indeed, the profound concern with such issues signals the use of the term literary jurisprudence to indicate this field of scholarship, as opposed to the loose association indicated by the nomenclature law and literature.

...