Law and Literature - History of The Movement

History of The Movement

Perhaps first to envision the movement were John Wigmore and Benjamin Cardozo, who acknowledged "novelists and poets" as the principal teachers of law in the first half of the 20th century. Most scholars, however, credit James Boyd White as the founder of the law and literature movement because of the dedicated research and distinguished publications he has contributed to this rapidly growing field. Among his many literary books and articles, White's most renowned publication, The Legal Imagination, is often credited with initiating the law and literature movement. This book, first published in 1973, is a fusion of anthology and critique, superficially resembling a traditional legal casebook but drawing on a much wider and more diverse range of sources, with headnotes and questions emphasizing the relationship of legal texts to literary analysis and literary texts to the legal issues that they explore.

The movement began attracting attention in the 1970s and by the 1980s had gained substantial ground in academia. The proponents of the law-in-literature theory, such as Richard Weisberg and Robert Weisberg, believe that literary works, especially narratives centered on a legal conflict, will offer lawyers and judges insight into the "nature of law" that would otherwise go missing in the traditionally strict study of legal rhetoric.

In its early stages, the law and literature movement focused strictly on the law in literature theory; however, beginning in the late 1970s the law as literature perspective began to gain popularity. This perspective seeks to enhance legal studies by examining and interpreting legal texts using the techniques of literary critics. Scholars such as White and Ronald Dworkin find greater relevance in law as literature because it maintains that the meaning of legal texts, such as written law, like any other genre of literature, can only be discovered through interpretation. Although legal scholars have long considered both literary and legal texts in their study of the legal process, the recent degree to which the two seemingly separate genres interact has sparked great debates among scholars.