Law, Literature, and The Legal Imagination

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.