Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature

Great literature can be the means of understanding as well as creating our world - by teaching and reinforcing society's laws, articulating its values, and enforcing the social contracts that unite us as a culture. What if literature itself generated our ideas and feelings about justice, marriage and family, property, authority, race, or gender? What if it enflamed our determination to pursue justice - or, conversely, undermined our ability to detect injustice? What if law in all its variations - from religious commandments to oral tradition to codified statute - embraced its own narrative assumptions to the point of absorbing purely literary conventions as a means of more forcefully arguing its points in the legal arena? And what if this dynamic relationship between written and unwritten laws and literature is constantly evolving? How do law and literature influence or reflect one other? And what lessons might we draw from their symbiotic relationship? Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature is a provocative exploration of just such questions - an examination of the rhetorical and philosophical connections that link these two disciplines.… (more)