Law in Literature, University of St. Thomas

This seminar will explore the law as a subject or theme in selected literary classics. Playwrights from Aristophanes to Robert Bolt (A Man for All Seasons) have used a court of law and the legal profession to help tell their timeless stories. Nineteenth-century novelists Charles Dickens and Fyodor Dostoevsky, and twentieth-century novelists Albert Camus (The Stranger) and Harper Lee (To Kill A Mockingbird) have used the law as a theme as well. The seminar will compare the civil and common law systems as reflected in literature and will examine the evolution of the jury. Students will work in teams to write and perform a one-act play based on subject matter studied in class. 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.