From Law-and-Literature to Law and the Humanities, Law and Culture… and Beyond?

'Law-and-Literature' emerged initially as a subdiscipline of legal education at USAmerican law schools during the 1970s and has since become an established part of the legal curriculum in the United States; it has also sparked the development of 'law and literature' as a flourishing interdisciplinary enterprise.1 The field developed partly in opposition to the prevalence of 'law and economics' as an educational paradigm in (USAmerican) legal education. Courses in the field were aimed at law students in an attempt to replenish their 'dry' legal studies with the spark of 'real life' and emotion which, proponents of Law-and-Literature argued, was an essential quality of literature lacking in legal education. Literature (usually of the highbrow, capital-letter variety) and the interpretive ambiguity of literary language was credited with the inherent ability to transcend the rigid categories deemed characteristic of the law. Literary texts mostly functioned as an 'ethical complement' to legal writing or, in Julie Stone Peters's words, as an "ethical corrective to the scientific and technocratic visions of law" (2005, 444). Literature, in a nutshell, was meant to 'repair' a perceived lack in legal education and legal practice. In this article, I will briefly explore the history of Law-and-Literature as well as competing and more recent incarnations of the field, argue for the interdisciplinary necessity of scholarly self-awareness, discuss a project which took interdisciplinarity seriously by bringing together early modern literature and contemporary law – the Shakespeare Moot Court Project (2002-2007) – and, in a last step, shed some light on the possible interconnections of law and literature with the (generic) laws of literature in my own take on the field. In doing so, I want to take seriously the potential pitfalls of interdisciplinary work. In her analysis of the methodological baggage that comes with the interdisciplinarity of law and literature, Doris Pichler has stressed that, "when carrying out research within this field, one has to position oneself very clearly" (2015, 26) within a specific academic or cultural tradition, a law system, a theoretical approach and a specific position with reference to 'law' and 'literature.' A brief caveat, therefore, on my own disciplinary point of view: my specific angle is that of an early modernist working on a book-length study of The Laws of Excess: Law, Literature, and the Laws of Genre in Early Modern Drama. I do not have a legal education nor am I a specialist in English legal history. My predicament is consequently that of most people engaged in interdisciplinary work – while I am (hopefully) an expert in the one field (early modern drama), I am all but a layperson in the other (early modern law and the English legal system more generally).