Law and Literature at Century’s End

Have you noticed how intellectually diverse Law and Literature has become in recent years?' At one time Law and Literature in American legal studies was a marginal subject taught at only a few law schools. These Law and Literature courses, following the lead of Dean Wigmore, explored the way law was implicated in the stories told in the great literary classics of Dickens, Kafka, and Melville. The law-in-literature perspective of these courses attempted to show how the stories in the classics of Western literature might offer lawyers and judges important lessons about the nature of law lessons which are missing in the official reported stories of the cases. This understanding of Law and Literature the "law-in-literature" perspective was a dominant understanding shaping the American Law and literature movement in its early stages of development. But much has changed since the first law-in-literature courses popped up in the legal curriculum. Beginning in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, a diverse new breed of Law and Literature scholarship appeared on the legal scene which has altered the landscape of the movement. Law and Literature practitioners in America were no longer just reading and studying the Great classics of Western literature; they were reading and studying law as if it were a special "genre" of literature to be interpreted like any story. As it turned out, Dickens, Kafka and Melville were being edged-out by authors like Derrida, Foucault, Heidegger and Wittgenstein as Law and Literature scholars explored the meaning of law's language as a cultural and literary artifact. If law were to be regarded as a unique genre of literature, then new critical techniques and methods of translation would be needed for focusing the critical eye of Law and Literature scholars on the meaning of legal texts, languages, and institutional practices. It should not be surprising then that Law and Literature scholars began looking beyond the Great books of Western literature to the critical texts of literary theory, structuralism, post-structuralism, deconstuctionism and the like to aid them in their literary translations of legal texts.