A review of Teaching Law and Literature, edited by Austin Sarat, Catherine O. Frank and Matthew Anderson

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Notes

1. For example, see Peter Goodrich, Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1990); Costas Douzinas and Lynda Nead, ed., Law and the Image: The Authority of Art and the Aesthetics of Law (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Paul Raffield, Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Judith Resnik and Dennis Curtis, Representing Justice: Invention, Controversy, and Rights in City-States and Democratic Courtrooms (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); R. K. Sherwin, Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011); Leif Dahlberg, ed., Visualizing Law and Authority: Essays on Legal Aesthetics. Law & Literature vol. 4 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2012); and Ruth Herz, The Art of Justice: The Judge's Perspective (Oxford: Hart, 2012).

2. James Boyd White, “Law and Literature: No Manifesto,” Mercer Law Review 39 (1988): 739–51, 746.

3. Benjamin N. Cardozo, “Law and Literature,” Yale Law Journal 48 (1939): 489–507, 490.

4. Julen Etxabe, The Experience of Tragic Judgment (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012).

5. Geoffrey H. Hartman, “Is an Aesthetic Ethos Possible? Night Thoughts after Auschwitz,” Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 6, no. 2 (1994): 135–55.

6. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority,” in Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, ed. Drucilla Cornell, Michel Rosenfeld and David Gray Carlson (London: Routledge, 1992), 3–67.

7. Domna C. Stanton, “Foreword: The Humanities in Human Rights: Critique, Language, Politics,” PMLA 121, no. 5 (2006), 1515–661 (1519–20).

8. Richard A. Posner, Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation (London: Harvard University Press, 1998).

9. Julie Stone Peters, “Law, Literature, and the Vanishing Real: On the Future of an Interdisciplinary Illusion,” PMLA 120, no. 2 (2005), 442–53.

10. William Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” 3.1.85–6, in The RSC Shakespeare: Complete Works, ed. Jonathan Bate and Eric Rasmussen (London: Macmillan, 2007).

11. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver's Travels (London: Benjamin Motte, 1726), Part IV: “A Voyage to the Country of the Houyhnhnms,” ch. V.

12. E. M. Forster, Howards End (London: Penguin, 1985 [1910]), ch. 22.

13. James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination (Boston: Little, Brown, 1973).

14. On the place of friendship in teaching law and literature, see, generally, Paul Raffield, “Sunday's Child: Drama, Ensemble and the Community of Law,” Law and Humanities 3, no. 2 (2009), 231–55.

15. Gary Watt, Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).

16. Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, “A Letter to his Son,” November 20, 1753.

17. Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003), 27.

18. The BBC's most recent television adaptation of Bleak House (screenwriter Andrew Davies, 2005) is so good on its own terms that it begs the nice (and, of course, in one sense, nonsense) question: which version of the story – the book or the television series – is the real version? It may seem sacrilegious to say it, but David Lean's film adaptation of Great Expectations (1946) can likewise claim to have superseded the “reality” of the book in the minds of many who are familiar with both.

19. Philip N. Meyer, “Visual Literacy and the Legal Culture: Reading Film as Text in the Law School Setting,” Legal Studies Forum 17, no. 1 (1993), 73–93 (91).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gary Watt

Gary Watt is a Professor in the School of Law at The University of Warwick, England. He is a National Teaching Fellow and was named UK “Law Teacher of the Year” in 2009. His teaching includes a module on law and literature and workshops on rhetoric delivered at the Royal Shakespeare Company. In addition to textbooks on trusts law, equity and mooting, he has written monographs on the subjects of equity in law and literature (Equity Stirring: The Story of Justice Beyond Law [Oxford, Hart, 2009]) and law and dress (Dress, Law and Naked Truth: A Cultural Study of Fashion and Form [London, Bloomsbury Academic, 2013]). He is one of the founding co-editors of the journal Law and Humanities.