Law and Literature, Northwestern University (Pritzker)

Literature is a cultural artifact, a creative practice, and a social bellwether. As lawyers we work with legal precedent that reflect a culture of rights and duties, we engage a creative rhetorical practice, and we make arguments about where we are or should be as a society. Stated this way, possible connections between literary and legal practices are revealed. In this course we will interrogate those connections. There will be three core inquiries around the ideas of law in literature, law as literature, and literature as law. Does our literary past inform our jurisprudential constitution? What can we learn as lawyers from a fictive practice of storytelling and close reading of texts? Can literary texts serve as persuasive authority for us as we make larger arguments about the social/legal/policy world we inhabit as lawyers? This information has been collected for the Post-Discipline Online Syllabus Database. The database explores the use of literature by schools of professional education in North America. It forms part of a larger project titled Post-Discipline: Literature, Professionalism, and the Crisis of the Humanities, led by Dr Merve Emre with the assistance of Dr Hayley G. Toth. You can find more information about the project at https://postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk/. Data was collected and accurate in 2021/22.