Aeschylus' Law

Abstract

Practitioners of "law and literature," a newly fashionable area of legal scholarship, are rarely concerned with literature at all. They have generally focused instead on literary criticism, seeking to apply current theories about interpreting literary texts to the judicial enterprise of interpreting legal texts. Much interesting work has been done in this vein, although there probably has been too little emphasis on the differences between judicial action and literary criticism, differences that limit the usefulness of analogies between one field and the other. I am more interested, though, in efforts to augment the "law and literature" movement with work that explores the relevance to law of literature itself, not only literary criticism. I cannot claim to know how fruitful such work will ultimately be, but we have barely begun to examine the images of law that appear in literature and to assess whether they illuminate the legal world in distinctive ways.