Law and Literature

The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature. This field has roots in two major developments in the intellectual history of law—first, the growing doubt about whether law in isolation is a source of value and meaning, or whether it must be plugged into a large cultural or philosophical or social-science context to give it value and meaning; and, second, the growing focus on the mutability of meaning in all texts, whether literary or legal. Those who work in the field stress one or the other of two complementary perspectives: law in literature (understanding enduring issues as they are explored in great literary texts) and law as literature (understanding legal texts by reference to methods of literary interpretation, analysis, and critique).

This movement has broad and potentially far reaching implications with regards to future teaching methods, scholarship, and interpretations of legal texts. Combining literature's ability to provide unique insight into the human condition through text with the legal framework that regulates those human experiences in reality gives a democratic judiciary a new and dynamic approach to reaching the aims of providing a just and moral society. It is necessary, in practical thought and discussion about the use of legal rhetoric, to understand text's role in defining human experience.

By applying literary doctrine to legal writing, the movement allows laws to be more readily interpreted and legal decisions to be more effectively conveyed. Providing clarity of expression can empower citizens, legal professionals, judges, politicians, and the various legal philosophers that keep a democratic society functioning as ideally as possible. Through the application of literary standards to legal documents it becomes easier to accommodate special cases and to shirk despotism and oppressive movements since the human element becomes reunited with the mechanism by which we regulate our lives. In short, the movement gives hope to a legal system that may need a jolt of humanity.