Family Feud: A Response to Robert Weisberg on Law and Literature

Abstract

While linked, despite our last names, to no other common ancestor than Adam (for whom he begrudges me my admiration), Robert Weisberg and I agree on so many aspects of Law and Literature theory that we may be said to have familial ties of the interdisciplinary kind. Like my namesake, I have studied literature to the ultimate degree; like him, I have taught the subject to undergraduates and graduate students in literature. So neither of us, as does the occasional upstart, comes to this multifaceted relation anxious only to spew out recently digested (and hence often bilious) matter, usually projected towards others' dust. Nor in discussing (as henceforth) "Weisberg's work," "Weisberg's approach," etc., can I wholly avoid the sense of self-critique or mirrorwatching that must earlier have affected those near namesakes Fiss and Fish in their famous disputations. Like Fish to constitutional theory, Weisberg brings to a kind of settled discourse (a decade of Law and Literature writings) insights otherwise overlooked by the field's practitioners, yet does so with an enthusiasm that barely masks his sympathies for that discourse.