Welcome
This guide is intended for students and researchers studying law and literature, although students and researchers from any field may find it useful.
Use this guide to find out about books and online resources for law and literature, including ebooks, ejournals, bibliographic databases.
If you have questions or need more help after using this research guide, please contact one of our librarians. We are ready to assist you with your research!
Quick Start
Overview
Law and literature is an interdisciplinary subject that has grown since the 1960s and 70s and uses both legal studies and literary studies to explore the boundaries and shared ground of both subjects. Its origins are mostly in America, but a separate field of European law-and-literature studies, drawing on poststructuralist and postmodern traditions, has also developed. Some of the key debates - such as rhetoric v. reason - are ancient philosophical debates.
Many different scholars mean many different things by the term 'law and literature'. This guide focuses on how literary techniques—narrative, metaphor, character, and perspective—inform legal reasoning and advocacy, and how legal forms shape our reading of literature.
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Literary Criticisms of Law
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ISBN: 9781400823635Publication Date: 2000-02-22In this book, the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the emerging study of law as literature, Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg show that law is not only a scheme of social order, but also a process of creating meaning, and a crucial dimension of modern culture. -
A Critical Introduction to Law and Literature
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ISBN: 9780521807432Publication Date: 2007-03-15Linguistic creativity is central to the law, with literary modes such as narrative and metaphor infiltrating legal texts. Equally, legal norms of good and bad conduct, of identity and human responsibility, are reflected or subverted in literature's engagement with questions of law and justice. Law seeks to regulate creative expression, while literary texts critique and sometimes openly resist the law.
Theoretical Foundations
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Benjamin N. Cardozo – Narrative in Judicial Writing: Justice Cardozo is often celebrated for the elegance and clarity of his opinions. In cases like Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. (1928), his use of narrative structure, how he frames facts, develops causation, and guides the reader toward judgment, demonstrates how storytelling techniques shape legal reasoning. In his early essay Law and Literature, he emphasized that style is not an afterthought but integral to meaning, arguing that “form is not something added to substance as a mere protuberant adornment”; rather, “the two are fused into a unity.” Cardozo illustrates that judicial writing is not only about applying rules but also about persuading through style, metaphor, and narrative flow.
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James Boyd White – The Legal Imagination: Often recognized as a foundational figure in the modern “Law and Literature” movement, James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination (1973) invites readers to think of law as a literary act, a realm where language not only describes but also constructs meaning. Encouraging lawyers to see themselves both as authors and readers, White challenges the conventional approach of simply applying rules; he pinvites lawyers to see themselves as authors and readers who must interpret, imagine, and persuade.
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Richard Weisberg – Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature: Richard Weisberg introduces the concept of “poethics," a blending of poetic and ethical considerations, to emphasize that the form of legal argument carries moral weight. In Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature, Weisberg urges that lawyers, like novelists, must choose language that is “precise, passionate, and real,” recognizing how rhetorical choices can either clarify justice or obscure it. He argues for, in his words, “the revival of jurisprudence through literary sources and techniques,” highlighting law’s ethical dimensions through attention to storytelling.
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Robert Cover – Nomos and Narrative: In his influential essay Nomos and Narrative, Robert Cover offers a compelling reframin: law is more than formal rules and institutions, it is rooted in the stories that communities tell about themselves, stories that create shared meaning, obligations, and authority. He famously states that “we inhabit a ‘nomos’—a normative universe”—and that “no set of legal institutions or prescriptions exists apart from the narratives that locate it and give it meaning.” For Cover, legal texts both reflect and generate the worlds in which people live.
Research Guides
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