Law

The ‘Law and Literature movement’ has generated two, parallel traditions of literary scholarship and pedagogy in the discipline of law, each as internally diverse. The first, which studies the law as literature, is typically associated with the work of James Boyd White, Professor Emeritus at Michigan Law and author of The Legal Imagination (1973). The second, which concerns the treatment of the law in literature, has been popularised by Richard Weisberg based at Cardozo Law, Yeshiva University, and by University of Chicago Law School scholars, whose recent law and literature conferences have generated no less than six edited essay collections in the last decade. [1] From scholarly works, we can learn much about the objectives, analytic protocols and objects of study that characterize law and literature study, but comparatively less about how literary reading is used in law classrooms across the United States to promote professional virtues and rhetorical mastery.

This collection identifies historic and active graduate law courses that draw on novels, plays, short stories, memoirs, and/or poetry to teach aspects of the legal profession. By collating information about these courses, their hosting institutions, and their instructors, this collection aims to clarify how and why literary pedagogies have been adopted in the discipline of law. The collection samples all institutions featured in U.S. News & World Report’s ranked list of the best providers of graduate studies in law in 2021.

This data collection 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 postdiscipline.english.ox.ac.uk.

Email postdiscipline@ell.ox.ac.uk to help us improve the data collection.

[1] See Bradin Cormack, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Richard Strier (eds), Shakespeare and the Law: A Conversation Among Disciplines and Professions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013); Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds), Subversion and Sympathy: Gender, Law, and the British Novel (Oxford: OUP, 2013); Martha C. Nussbaum and Saul Levmore (eds), American Guy: Masculinity in American Law and Literature (Oxford: OUP, 2014); Alison L. LaCroix, Saul Levmore, and Martha C. Nussbaum (eds), Power, Prose, and Purse: Law, Literature, and Economic Transformations (Oxford: OUP, 2019); and Alison L. LaCroix, Jonathan S. Masur, Martha C. Nussbaum, and Laura Weinrib (eds), Cannons and Codes: Law, Literature, and America’s Wars (Oxford: OUP, 2021).