Literature and Law Seminar, University of Pittsburgh

In this seminar, we will read and discuss stories about law. In such writers as Dostoevsky, Melville, Glaspell, Wright, Lee, Shakespeare, Camus, Kafka, Porter, and Malamud, and in many popular culture and on-line media, LAW is represented, criticized, admired, and deconstructed, There is no better, or more enjoyable!, way to learn about the underlying premises and prejudices of legal systems than to participate in the real conflicts depicted in great stories, In this seminar, too, we will take a COMPARATIVE approach, because the writers chosen come from varied backgrounds, and their careful depictions of trials, investigations, and lawyers in action permit us to see how legal systems differ one from another.. Thus by perusing carefully Dostoevski , Kafka, and Camus, for example, we will see how criminal procedure on the continent of Europe differs markedly from common law approaches to guilt and innocence. The stuff of stories will be supplemented, where helpful, by readings in comparative law. Meanwhile these stories also permit us to raise questions of race, religion, and gender both within specific contexts (Shakespeare's Venice; Susan Glaspell's early 20th century America; Richard Wright's Chicago; Harper Lee's Jim Crow south) and comparatively (Bernard Malamud's recreation of the "blood libel trials"). Each student will submit a 20 page final term paper on a topic of their choosing as approved by the instructor. This course is longrunning, and has been taught by two different Faculty members. The early version (pre-2020/21) had the following course description: Law both affects and reflects cultural values and norms. In this seminar we will investigate the degree to which the law represents and interprets fundamental societal values and norms as expressed in selected literary works. We shall read an eclectic sample of 19th and 20th Century novels in a search for the expression of fundamental cultural values, norms, and prohibitions to determine how they find expression or rejection in the law. Particular attention will be paid to whether the principles of property, contract, tort and criminal law promote or contradict the values found in the literary sources. By so doing, we should gain a richer understanding of how law embodies fundamental human needs and desires. Probable readings: Walter Van Tilburg Clark, The Ox-Bow Incident; Ernest Hemingway, “The Doctor and the Doctor’s Wife;” Herman Melville, Billy Budd; William Maxwell, So Long, See You Tomorrow; Thomas Bell, Out of This Furnace; Albert Camus, The Stranger; Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; and Bernard Schlink, The Reader. 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.