Courses in law and literature tend to focus primarily (often exclusively) on literary texts. My view is that literature can be more productively studied when literary and legal materials are placed next to each other. This approach does not treat law as the taken-for-granted backdrop that students already know, but instead makes explicit the similarities and differences between the two areas. What you have already learned about the law in other classes (no prerequisites required!) is not inevitably alien to the qualities of literary writing and analysis. In that way, the course is designed to show how legal modes of thought are sometimes already present in literary texts and vice versa. To that end, my syllabus combines literary readings, literary criticism, judicial opinions, and legal scholarship. Questions we will ask: How does literature use or respond to legal structures, themes, and analytical techniques, and vice versa? How does literature portray legal institutions and processes? What can literature bring to the performance of legal tasks, including legal narrative? To what extent can literary critical accounts of narrative structure and coherence explain the role of narrative in law, and where do these accounts fall short? What is achieved and what is missed by positing literature as law’s “other” (e.g., as the imaginative and ethical alternative to legal rules and constraints)? We will take up various problems at the intersection of law and literature: legal fictions, forms of legal writing and explanation, and the regulation of literature through copyright law. Next we will focus on two legal problems that have also occupied literary thinkers: the problem of criminal responsibility and literature’s ability to document human thought and motives, and the question of privacy in criminal law, tort law, and fiction. Afterwards, we will explore the concept of jurisdiction, terra nullius, and crown land. We will end by considering possible future directions for law and literature. Reading list includes Dorian Gray, The Importance of Being Earnest, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, The Round House, and The House of the Vampire.
