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Before Law and Literature: Law or Literature
Blumberg, Frederick
Blumberg, Frederick
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Abstract
This article draws attention to an overlooked set of situations and some
responses to them integral to the longer history of law and literature. These
situations I call law-or-literature dilemmas: when a desire to pursue the
humanities meets external pressure to study or practice law, and by all
indications the choice between them is mutually exclusive. Out of
dissatisfaction with the predicament, efforts emerge to outmaneuver the
options, and in certain instances the law-or-literature problem has found a
law-and-literature solution. The source of these syncretic initiatives, a
literary bent confronting a straitened vocational choice, is perhaps so
obvious that we have not entertained it as a primitive impetus for the lawand-
literature enterprise.
It is worthwhile to look at how law-or-literature conflicts get reframed as
complementarities because it can enhance our perspective of the motives
and provenance of law and literature as a field. If we wish to understand
what has brought law and the humanities together, it is essential to see what
has kept them apart. The paper does not proceed chronologically but like a
triptych with each panel based on a different kind of pressure—social,
professional, and institutional—bearing down against the litterateurlawyer
and each illustrating a notable individual effort to resist that
pressure and make literature a part of lawyers’ education, practice, or
edifying leisure.