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Law, Literature, and The Legal Imagination
Stern, Simon
Stern, Simon
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Abstract
Law and literature occupies an unusual place among the interdisciplines
in the legal academy. Various interdisciplinary conjunctions have found a
home on law faculties over the last half-century or so, such as law and
economics, law and sociology, and law and psychology, more recently
supplemented by law and neuroscience.1 Most law professors could
summarize the aims of scholarship fairly accurately in these areas. For
instance, if asked to propose a topic for a new article, even someone who
rarely reads work in law and psychology could probably offer a plausible
example—maybe not an example that scholars in that area would find
compelling, but at least one that they would not reject as inapposite. Law
and literature has had a place in the legal academy for about the same
amount of time, as this symposium attests, and yet those who do not read
current scholarship in this field tend to have a vague or even misinformed
understanding of what the work entails. Having outlasted the many
predictions of its demise, the field nevertheless suffers from a strange kind
of identity crisis—not because of anxieties or doubts among those who
write in this area, but because of confident but misguided accounts that
others would offer when describing the field.