A Practicing Lawyer Looks Back on Law and Literature

Law and Literature has much to be proud of. In two decades or so, it has grown from an abstract idea to a contemporary school of jurisprudence. It has started to permeate the legal consciousness. It is taught in colleges as well as law schools. It has produced an expanding body of writing that is probing, controversial, and fascinating. It has drawn people to many conferences and symposia, some of them international. Special journals devoted to Law and Literature, such as this one, have sprouted up and continue to flourish. Wonderful accomplishments these are, especially for a fledgling intellectual movement, but they are not enough. The greatest shortcoming in Law and Literature to date has been its failure to reach and engage the ordinary practicing lawyer. For the most part, Law and Literature has remained firmly entrenched in legal academia, its realm of origin. The shirt-sleeve lawyer is essentially untouched. If Law and Literature is to thrive the way it should, this situation must be changed. Practicing lawyers are highly eligible candidates for the Law and Literature Movement. Not only do we read for a living, but we have been trained, in law school, to read analytically, much the way that literary critics do. We are taught to read and to apply statutes and precedent in strategic ways; to look behind texts and to use them as tools of advocacy. Literary critics approach their subjects in a similar fashion, seeing them not only as products of the creative process, but as tools for understanding the era and culture from which they spring. Practicing lawyers are well-suited for participation in the Law and Literature Movement. This kind of participation, moreover, would be highly enriching to any practitioner. Reading and reflecting upon books and plays that feature other lawyers as characters, and that explore the role of law and courts in worlds such as Shakespeare's, Kafka's, and Flaubert's, can give lawyers a sense of pride, and perhaps provide them with insights into the role they play in their own society.