Law and Literature, University of New Mexico

In the early 1970’s, scholars of both literature and law began to encroach on one other’s theoretical terrain. Legal scholars began investigating the presence of legal thought and argumentation in canonical literary works, while literary scholars began to apply literary concepts such as narration, subjectivity, voice, etc. to legal discourse. The first thorough presentation of this developing movement was The Legal Imagination, published in 1973 by an American professor of Law, English, and Classics. The movement has developed into a variety of approaches (law-as-literature, law-in-literature, hermeneutics, etc.), generally subsumed under the heading Law and Literature. This predominantly American common law phenomenon has also been developing in civil law France. While French legal scholars demonstrate no particular interest in this genre mixing, such influential writers as Barthes, Duras, Foucault, and Derrida have treated the law as any other readable discourse. Some of their writing, in fact, became seminal in the Law and Literature movement. This course investigates the principles behind the Law and Literature movement, the interaction of various intellectual traditions (especially American and French interpretative strategies), and the usefulness of such theories in “normal” legal and literary study. Although the course is in English, those students who wish to read translated texts in the original are encouraged to do so. The course will hopefully attract students of a wide variety of disciplines, including literature, law, history, political science, philosophy, cultural studies, classics, women studies, and American studies. Despite its minor emphasis on American law and literature and French cultural studies, the course is not designed for any one group of students and rather is meant to be accessible and interesting to all those generally interested in the topic. Students will, in fact, have a say in some of the course’s readings and direction. The final readings list (largely excerpts) will be drawn from M. Foucault, C. MacKinnon, J. Derrida, R. Posner, S. Levinson, R. Weisberg, M. Duras, R. Barthes, J.B. White, S. Fish, R. West, P. Brooks, P. Williams, and M. Montoya among others. These texts will be available electronically, although some optional copies of the original texts will be available at the UNM Bookstore. Some other primary texts may also be read, although their choice will depend on the make-up of the class. Some possibilities include readings from ancient Greece, “crime fiction”, cinema, and actual legal cases. Accordingly, students are encouraged to bring outside material into the class. The sponsoring department of this course is COMP/MLNG. It is not a regular Law School course curriculum offering, but is only a crosslisted course in which UNM School of Law students may receive full credit toward the J.D. degree. Law students enrolling in this course must take it for a standard letter grade (“A+” – “F”) in order to receive credit and it does factor into the semester and cumulative GPAs. 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.