The City and the Poet

Abstract

Three decades after James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination' inaugurated it, the law-and-literature enterprise presents conflicting symptoms of health. On the one hand, the field appears to be flourishing as never before. Recent years have seen a spate of books taking law-and-literature approaches. The enterprise has penetrated the legal academy. Conferences on the subject occur with some frequency and attract renowned literary scholars, legal scholars, and jurists. On the other hand, the field continues to be plagued by skepticism. Although law and literature is a contemporary of law and economics, and arguably a response to it, scholarship in law and literature lags far behind that in law and economics, at least in quantity. It is telling that the book most adopted in law-and-literature courses, Richard Posner's Law and Literature, was penned by a scholar best known for law and economics approaches. This book takes the stern line that law and literature have less to say to each other than might be thought and observes that courses in the field are still considered "soft."