English Law Courts and the Novel

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Notes

1 Jonathan H. Grossman, The Art of Alibi: English Law Courts and the Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), Future quotations from this book will be identified in the text by page numbers enclosed in parentheses.

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2 Neither does Grossman discuss whether readers subsequently emulated the fictional repletion of legal stories and trial scenes in the courtroom, thereby reversing the shaping process, a question that extends to the impact of the present frenzy to create trial scenes in popular fiction, films, and television. In other words, a question worthy of future exploration is did the mapping experience a switch even in the nineteenth century?

3 Black’s Law Dictionary 72 (7th ed. 1999).

4 Reminiscent of Virginia Woolf ’s statement in her essay “Modern Fiction” that “life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged.”

5 Alan M. Dershowitz, “Life is Not a Dramatic Narrative.” In Law’s Stories, Peter Brooks and Paul Gewirtz, eds. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996) p. 101. See concurrence in the same volume Catharine A. MacKinnon’s “Law Stories as Reality and Politics” at 232.

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6 See also Alexander Welsh, Strong Representations: Narrative and Circumstantial Evidence in England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992)

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cited by Grossman as an approach his own text is “building on,” a foundation that might not be as sound as he views it. Grossman’s statement that “[s] ince its publication work in law and literature has largely been following Welsh’s model”(6) might be misplaced as well.

7 My grateful acknowledgement to Professor William J. Ard of the Thomas M. Cooley Law School, Lansing, Michigan and Professor James Seaton of Michigan State University, Department of English, East Lansing, Michigan for their comments and suggestions after reading this essay.