Law and Literature Seminar, Southwestern Law School

online resource

posted on 2022-07-06, 16:21 authored by Post Discipline AdminPost Discipline Admin

This course appears to be run slightly differently by two different instructors, as reflected by the course descriptions below: This seminar examines popular representations of law and lawyers as culturally meaningful texts. What strategies do creators use in their portrayals of the practice and its practitioners? Why has the image of the lawyer, the depiction of courtroom trials, and the conception of justice resonated so powerfully in American culture Has the role of the profession in the popular consciousness changed over time? How relevant are issues of race, class, and gender to the way in which legal narrative is created and understood? The above are but a few of the questions addressed as the class looks at this narrative in fiction, film, and news coverage. This seminar critically explores some of the broader themes of legal education via the prism of literature. Through the works of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Auster, Jorge Luis Borges, Kate Chopin, Donald Barthelme, Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tim O'Brien, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon, the course uses the short story format as a vehicle to analyze the discursive subtexts of our jurisprudence. Specific units of the class focus on our notions of equality, the law's ability to respond to technological change, law and morality, the construction of guilt and innocence, fact-finding and investigation, insanity and reason, evidence, and memory, and the law of the family. 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.

History

Subject Area

Law

Geographic Region

Pacific

University or College

Southwestern Law School

Funding Status

Private

Annual Tuition and Mandatory Fees 2021-2022 ($) (Resident; Non-resident, where applicable)

55316

Course Title

Law and Literature Seminar

Terminal Degree of Instructor(s)

PhD American Culture; JD

Position of Instructor(s)

Professor of Law; Professor of Law

Academic Year(s) Active

unclear, but ongoing; available records show that the course ran in 2017/18, but likely to have run earlier.

Primary Works on Reading List

Works by Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Auster, Jorge Luis Borges, Kate Chopin, Donald Barthelme, Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tim O'Brien, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon.