Literature in the legal classroom

Perhaps not unexpectedly, different law teachers have different ideas about what ‘law and literature’ means in the context of a legal curriculum. Broadly speaking, law and literature classes fall into three categories: law in literature, which considers the fictional representation of lawyers and the law; law as literature, which looks at judgments and statutes as literary works; and legal imagination, which looks predominantly at language and style. Inevitably, a course on legal literature will utilise elements from all three schools of thought, while concentrating on perhaps the most accessible: law in literature.

Increasingly, academics complain about the difficulty that students have with independent study. Law teachers are now proficient at PowerPoint and appreciate the importance of detailed lecture handouts; we feed our students digestible bites of law as if they were baby birds, rather than encouraging them to flap their own intellectual wings. One of the joys (and worries) of running a legal literature course is that, with this subject,