Visions and Revisions of Law and Literature

This review juxtaposes two recently published volumes of essays, both from 2004, which belong to the growing field of Law and Literature. To a certain degree these collections’ thematic differences highlight developments of the now thirty-year-old interdisciplinary movement they work within and the variety of modes in which it is now being pursued. For this reason and because of the intriguing transposition of elements in their titles, Law and Literature and Literature and Law, the volumes are compared in the following.

Michael J. Meyer’s Literature and Law

The very title of Literature and Law, edited by Michael J. Meyer (Rodopi), speaks for its editor’s intention to perform a rethink of the interdiscipline commonly termed »Law and Literature«. This scholarly approach was initiated in America in the early nineteen-seventies. It developed, amongst a number of critical revisions of law called critical legal studies, as a method of critiquing law and legal education from inside the discipline. The movement’s founder J. B. White 1 called for a more ethical practice of law which was to be based on its recognizing its literary qualities. His key terms were language, translation, rhetoric, and community; and he foresaw a visionary unity of content and form in ethical, performative, legal writing. Somewhat disappointingly, the introduction to Meyer’s volume is so brief – just two pages – that no critical reflection on the consequences of a reordering of the constitutive terms of the field, as suggested by the volume’s title, can be articulated. Presumably, this is in the interest of foregrounding literature as opposed to law. As will be seen in the following, however, the essays for the most part perform a type of analysis called ›law in literature‹, that is they examine how literary texts depict or reflect on legal problems or issues to provide a critique of law.

One sentence from its introduction does help to locate the collection more specifically within the various trajectories of Law-and-Literature scholarship:

By exploring interdisciplinary context, readers will surely be made more aware, more sensitive, to the role that stories play in the legal profession and to the dilemmas faced by legal systems that often succeed in maintaining the rights and privileges of a dominant societal group at the expense of a less powerful one. (p. viii)

This sentence places the volume in the vein of Law-and-Literature scholarship called »narrative jurisprudence or (in its more folksy moments) the legal storytelling movement«. 2 Narrative jurisprudence works to uncover storytelling elements in judicial process, including trials and sentencing, as well as the ways in which ideas about race, gender, and disability are constructed through legal means. Alternative forms of storytelling have also been employed in Critical Race Theory and feminist jurisprudence to counter the formalism of traditional legal practice and the traditional elision of the experiences of the underprivileged. Literature and Law, then, has a political aim, if perhaps an inadequately articulated one. It is – and this is a mark of American Law-and-Literature scholarship in general – concerned particularly with issues of racial and gender bias in legal systems and processes.

The volume opens strongly with an essay on Camus’s The Stranger (L’Étranger, 1942) by Mary Ann Frese Witt, a professor for comparative literature, and Eric Witt, a lawyer who practices in both the US and France. Due to its being a canonical favorite of Law-and-Literature analysis, The Stranger may be difficult to explicate in new terms. 3 Yet the authors of »Retrying the Stranger« suceed by offering a great deal of comparativist insight into the French Algerian legal system of the 1930s. This includes the juge d’instruction, who investigated a criminal charge and decided whether it should be pursued in trial; it also comprises the greater powers than in the Anglo-American system of the prosecutor, who performed a dual role as magistrate and prosecuting attorney. Such elements of the French legal system may be confusing to Anglo-Americans readers more familiar with adversarial trails between (in legal terms) equal opponents: the inquisitional system aims to uncover truth rather than to arbitrate between legal competitors; it may determine proof on the basis of the defendant’s personal convictions. Identifying these differences helps to shed light on the text by explaining its unfamiliar legal context.

Additionally, the authors read the protagonist as a surrogate for Muslim subjects under French colonial rule, who were without citizenship or equal representation under the law. The authors make an analogy between the treatment of Meursault, who is effectively convicted for his lack of expressive filial love and religious belief, just as Muslims were routinely denied rights due to their not being Christian.

Literature’s Unmasking of Oppression
through Forms of Silencing

Whereas uncovering the partiality of justice in terms of ethnicity and religion in French Algeria is the emphasis of the first essay, the silencing of women and the poor before American law is the subject of the second and the fifth ones. In a reading of Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres (1996), Susan Ayres interprets this feminist re-telling of Shakespeare’s Lear against the background of Robin West’s challenge to a masculinist, universalistic ethics of justice with an ethics of care that is particularistic and cognizant of context. 4 The interpretation of Smiley’s novel as an intertextual critique of the presentation of Goneril and Reagen in Lear is quite convincing. Yet it is questionable whether the novel can be read as an illustration of the gender inequity that has been perpetrated by the Supreme Court decision (United States v. Morrison), as the author insists. Moreover, the author’s conception, via the theories of James Boyd White and Robin West, of literature as a holistic antidote to the formalism of law perpetrates, to this reviewer’s mind, romanticized and inadequately critical visions of literature.

The volume’s fifth essay, Gwen McNeill Ashburn’s »Silence in the Courtroom« also concerns the enforced abrogation of the rural poor’s legal rights as illustrated by a popular novel The Ballad of Frankie Silver (Sharyn McCrumb,1998). Interestingly, this work is juxtaposed with a major text in forensic linguistics Just Words, 5 which argues persuasively that unjust acts are perpetrated through legal language and that language, therefore, must be the focus of legal reform. Bringing forensic linguistics into a discussion of literary treatments of law is commendable, as is the move to include ›popular‹ literature within the corpus of canonical primary texts in Law-and-Literature studies.

The volume’s third essay by Karen C. Blansfield concerns another text that uncovers the inequities of the justice system, in this case a British one. David Hare’s seminal Murmuring Judges (1991) exposes not only the classism and ethnic prejudice inherent in Britain’s criminal justice system, but also the disconnect between the constabulary and the justices, who both work like separate hermetic clubs and do their best not to communicate with each other. The essay introduces Hare’s important play with lucidity and highlights its insights into institutional inequities as they are illustrated by individual characters’ fates. It also demonstrates how women characters act within their respective parts of the penal and judicial systems as agents of reform. However, with its unquestioningly admiring tone, the essay fails to offer a new theoretical interpretation of the play or to go beyond an analysis based on mere close reading.

The following comparison of Jaroslav Hašek’s The Good Soldier Švejk (1921/22) and Kafkas’s The Trial (Der Prozeß, 1925) by Jenifer Cushman is, like Eric Sterling’s essay on Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer (1996), not strong. Hence I mention them only briefly. The former wants to be a discussion of whether both works can be described as »minor literature« as defined by Deleuze and Guattari and proceeds rapidly to the forgone conclusion that Hašek’s unfinished novel is not. Unfortunately, the concept of minority literature is used merely to show how Kafka’s sense of alienation as a German Jew in Habsburg Prague informs Joseph K.’s experience of his arrest, trial, and execution. The treatment of Malamud’s novel on Russian anti-Semitic prejudices regarding ritual murder is highly undertheorized; it manages only to relate the novel’s plot and its treatment of anti-Semitism in painfully close detail. Notions of how legal practices are specifically affected by secular prejudice remain without elucidation.

Edith Wharton on Lawyers,
Rights, and Contracts

Two of the volume’s essays deal with Edith Wharton’s novella Summer (1917) and suggest a joint reading. Deborah Hecht treats two fictional lawyer figures in Wharton’s work, one in Summer and the other in The Touchstone (1900), and reminds this reader of many conventional readings of Charles Dickens and his lawyer characters. Again, the essay lacks critical foundation and does not go much beyond the book report mode. By contrast, Alicia Renfroe’s discussion of Summer as a critical commentary on rights-based justice systems as well as those grounded in natural law is more challenging and compelling. It provides a theoretically informed background to the imbrications of social and sexual contract in the novella and, echoing Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract (1988), posits the novella as a challenge to inherently sexist social contract theory. Both of these essays would have been stronger if they had been placed in a volume dealing solely with legal issues and Wharton’s work or had been written in closer dialogue with one another.

Racial Discrimination
in the American Justice System

Two essays overtly explore racism under American law: »Mumia Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row as Post-Legal Prison Writing« and »Challenging the Court: Charles Chesnutt’s Marrow of Tradition«. The former combines questions of politics and content with considerations of aesthetics and representation. In this, the essay moves away from the preoccupation with the realist novel as a paradigm for ethical inquiry which has informed much American Law and Literature (cf. work by Richard Weisberg, Martha Nussbaum and Wai Chee Dimock). Abu-Jamal’s Live from Death Row (1996) is read as belonging to the second-wave of (recent) autobiographical prison writings, the first being characterized by figures such as Malcolm X and Eldridge Cleaver, who were galvanizing figures of social reform. Whereas they could follow the narrative of the conversion autobiography, describing their moral educations and politicizations in prisons, writers such as Abu-Jamal live in the age of the super-max prison, a period in which public sentiment seems to believe that prisoners cannot be punished enough and rehabilitation is no longer a desirable end (cf. James Q. Whitman: Harsh Justice, 2005). Hence in a Foucaultian moment, Abu-Jamel identifies himself not only with other incarcerated individuals but with the pariahs amongst them, the mad. As Brian Conniff summarizes the author’s endeavor: »Ultimately, for Abu-Jamal, it is not enough to listen to an articulate death row inmate, perhaps one like himself. It is also necessary to listen to the demented cries of the ›lunatic‹ on the row« (p. 171). This essay points to the larger »prisonization« of American society, a trend of punitivity that arguably was instrumental in providing a moral climate in which the abuse and torture of prisoners in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib was deemed morally permissible.

»Challenging the Court« also deals with American institutional racial injustice but recalls a period in which realist fiction could, perhaps, more powerfully perform legal critique. Gwen Mathewson reads Charles Chesnutt’s 1901 The Marrow of Tradition as a reaction to the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson (1896), which effectively sanctioned the Jim Crow laws of segregation that justified overt racial discrimination in the South during the following sixty years. Chesnutt’s novel illustrates on the one hand the pain inflicted by these laws as they affect the life of the novel’s sympathetic protagonist Dr. William Miller. On the other hand, it proposes an alternative code of ethics – and the system of justice such a code could inform – as exemplified by the heroic altruism of Miller’s wife Janet. It is interesting to contrast the essays on Chesnutt and Abu-Jamal, for they reveal their authors’ and commentators’ differing senses of to what degree a critique of racialist judicial processes in American society can affect positive change.

Other Related Pursuits

Three essays in this long collection fit poorly into any roster. Nancy Lawson Remler and Hugh Lawson’s piece invokes a kind of reading-response criticism to compare a literary scholar’s and a judge’s contrasting readings of the once unquestioned heroism of Atticus Finch in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird (1960). This quite creative account of a daughter and father’s responses to the text and contrary senses of what makes it important reveals their differing assumptions about gender, parenting, feminism, and critical theory. Yet the essay fails to adequately address its pertinence to larger questions of Law and Literature.

Ana María Frailé-Marcos moves beyond the collection’s general focus on American literature and cultural debates in »The Letter of the Law and Canadian Letters« to discuss Joy Kogawa’s Obasan (1981). This novel portrays the sufferings of Japanese Canadians due to their displacement and internment during the Second World War. It also questions the success of Canada’s policy of multiculturalism since the late 1980s. Like the essay on Chesnutt, this reading is somewhat problematic in that it ignores the literariness and potentially playful qualities of fiction to treat Obasan simply as a vehicle for social criticism.

Joseph Suglia’s essay on Kafkas’s In the Penal Colony (1919) and Leibnizian philosophy also fits poorly into any attempt to find an overriding structure or red thread within the volume. In this, the collection’s most philosophically-engaged essay, Suglia imagines Kafka’s dark story taking Leibnizian theodicy to trial. Unexpectedly and rather too briefly, the author moves into an analysis of how Leibniz subverts his own metaphysics in the story of Theodorus. Considering religion in self-justifications of the law seems an important project. Yet the author does not make the initial critical move of arguing for why he equates law and god in this essay. A number of theoretical positions are assumed, and this oversight renders the argument problematic.

Legal Culture, Birth Control,
and Abortion

Leaving discussion of the collection’s most successful essay for last, Beth Widmaier Capo’s investigation of birth control rhetoric in interwar American fiction transverses new ground in Law-and-Literature scholarship. It goes beyond a formalistic understanding of the Literary as written fiction and the Legal as law to observe their related cultural manifestations. As the author writes:

[A] more interesting mode of investigation [than law in literature] is looking beyond these explicitly ›legal‹ concerns to examine how narrative literature acts as a rhetorical discourse, shaping the minds of readers (even, potentially, lawyers and judges).
This approach analyzes law as experienced as a material condition rather than as abstract theory or narrative trope. (p. 122)

Capo reviews laws against birth control and abortion and the efforts made in literary fiction and illustrations from serial publications to treat unwanted pregnancy as a symptom of poverty rather than moral weakness. Simultaneously, such texts demonize abortion and non-normative sexuality in women. Thus this study shows how fictional discourses may at once criticize some conservative socio-legal policies and prejudices while perpetuating others. Perhaps the most critically sophisticated essay in the collection, it implicitly departs from romanticized notions of the literary as automatically being a more ethical and just discourse than its legal counterpart. Furthermore, it moves Law-and-Literature scholarship beyond rereading canonical novels into a direction advocated by Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg in Literary Approaches to the Law (2000) to engage more broadly with questions of cultural manifestations of the law.

Summary of the Volume

As this, I am afraid, quite disparate cornucopia of comments has shown, much positive work is being performed in Literature and Law, with theoretically exciting essays being offered by Capo and Conniff in particular. Yet the collection lacks editing. Fewer more intrinsically connected essays would have been better chosen, and the positing of an overriding principle of what the volume aims to do would have helped the essayists to make more coherent individual points. The volume’s general failure to enunciate a clear theoretical standpoint extends, unfortunately, to some but not all of its essays.

Patrick Hanafin, Adam Gearey,
and Joseph Brooker’s Law and Literature –
Reappraising the Field

Despite its more conventional title, Law and Literature presents a revision of the field that encompasses critical practices more familiar from British than American Law-and-Literature scholarship. 6 As in Literature and Law, no ready definition of the Law-and-Literature movement is attempted in the introduction. Rather an endnote works to draw the diverse strands of the volume into a unified narrative of discontinuity. Importantly, the volume’s editors all work at the Birkbeck College of Law in London, arguably the center of critical legal studies and critical jurisprudence in the UK. This gives the work a particularly Continental flavor in the sense that it is explicitly engaged with an ethics of alterity that is informed by the thought of Blanchot, Levinas, and Heidegger as well as a postmodernist outlook.

Post-Colonial Interventions

Like Literature and Law, this collection also opens with an essay that addresses French colonialism in Algeria. Patrick Hanafin’s analyzes Maurice Blanchot’s (and Dionys Mascolo’s) Declaration of the Right to Insubordination in the Algerian War (1960) which espoused the right not to bear arms. It muses on Blanchot’s awareness of the role of the writer to temporarily suspend events in order to challenge the law and the duties it enforces in the interests of the rights of an unknown other. Writing becomes a subversion and an interruption of the law which is extended into the actual courtroom, where the magistrate who examined Blanchot for authoring the insubordinate Declaration had »to take sick leave for what he termed moral exhaustion, a monstrously appropriate malady for a servant of the law to be afflicted with« (p. 6). In a 1981 defense of the Vietnamese boat people, Michel Foucault echoes Blanchot’s move away from a natural theory of individual rights towards a vision of rights as a defense of those vulnerable persons who are elided in law. This interruption of law is likened then by Hanafin to the moment of community that arose in New York City during the blackout in the summer of 2003. Whereas the essay provides a powerful rethink of Blanchot’s import for an ethics of the Other, specifically, and for Law-and-Literature scholarship in general, this comparison appears somewhat specious. Many New Yorkers experienced a new found sense of community during the blackout. However, they were not protesting or actively contributing to a suspension of political events. Nonetheless, the reference to New York and the present does help to locate the concerns of the essays generally within the politics of the post 9/11 »war on terror« and the second Iraq war.

Seconding a new reading of non-canonical Law-and-Literature texts is Joseph Brooker’s reading of Brian O’Nolan’s (or Brian Ó’Nualláin’s) – better known as the novelist Flann O’Brien – comic writings on law, court proceedings, and constitution in post-colonial Ireland. This rhetorical study demonstrates how the pedantic O’Nolan challenged the foundational myths of the Irish Free State by applying his forensic fury to the workings of the state, its courtrooms, and legal texts. The author shows how O’Nolan teases at questions of language, by replacing the ghostly official first language of Irish with the even deader language of Latin in his fictional courtrooms, and by pointing out discrepancies between the English and Irish versions of the 1937 Constitution, including the poorly written quality of the Irish text. Brooker suggests that O’Nolan was an early critic of Irish pride and linguistic nationalism. His critique of discrepancies in the constitution is, moreover, an early comment on the problematic function of foundational constitutions themselves.

Picking up on the post-colonial strain of scholarship and on Blanchot’s interruption of the legal, the next essay examines South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report (1998). Adam Gearey reads the Report in light of Desmond Tuto’s quotation from Emily Dickinson’s poem 1129 in its foreword:

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Cirrcuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise

As Lightening to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –

Gearey first places his essay theoretically within the field of aesthetic jurisprudence. Then he demarcates American scholarship on Critical Race Theory from related but different discussions in the British and South African contexts. To simplify greatly, he then interprets Tuto’s citing of Dickinson’s poem via an understanding of a poetics of truth and a Heideggerian notion of community to discover a sublime quality of voice in the Commission Report. This voice speaks through circumvention and problematizes itself, thus following the metonymies of light and visibility that Dickinson so richly explores in her poem. This interpretation is then mapped onto the Commission’s recognition of four kinds of truths that needed to be addressed in South Africa’s recognition of its violent past. The essay concludes that an aesthetic notion of truth as presencing, imagined, sublime and slow, with an attendant re-theorization of history, is original to the Commission. The themes of this intriguing essay, including the post-colonial sublime and its controversial reading of Heidegger, need greater explication in a monograph.

Poetry and the Legality of War

Another feature of much British Law-and-Literature scholarship is the greater interest in poetic and mythical texts as compared to the preoccupation with novels in typical American work. While Gearey concentrates on Dickinson, Melanie L. Williams 7 focuses on W. H. Auden’s poem September 1, 1939, which was written in the first days of World War II and marks the date of Germany’s invasion of Poland.

Williams’s essay presents a subtle reading less of Auden’s poem than of how the author’s emendations to and later rejection of it, as well as its misappropriations for a number of political causes, speaks to the general crisis of faith. This crisis followed on events of the Second World War and finds its echoes in the post-9/11 era. The author reads Auden’s distancing of himself from the poem and its longing for an organic transcendent solution to violence as a recognition of his own act of bad faith. This bad faith and recurrence to »an overweening view of human nature« (p. 70) can be located particularly in the poem’s original last lines: »Hunger allows no choice / To the citizen or the police / We must love one another or die«. Then and now, Williams persuasively argues, war focalizes historical debates on notions of legality and heightens the human hankering after polaristic systems of thought. Williams looks through the lenses of the reception of Auden’s poem to explain the legal philosophy of individuals such as Ronald Dworkin, who represents a kind of American jurisprudence that implicitly believes in its inherent rightness. Williams’s essay synthesizes then a history of ideas, including the natural and positivist law debate, with a powerful response to Auden’s reading of his own work. If the essay, taken in part from Williams’s Empty Justice. One Hundred Years Of Law Literature & Philosophy (2002), has a fault it is its compression. One finds intriguing and complex meditations on A. N. Whitehead, for instance, banned to the footnotes. For this reader, the essay has a particular political pertinence, as it traces the history of »the production of the combination of Protestant, puritan, and constitional ideology apparent in Dworkin and in present-day domestic and international Anglo-American, and particularly, American politics and law« (p. 67).

With Gearey and O’Brien, Piyel Haldar also pursues a post-colonial project within Law and Literature. His essay, a motif analysis, documents another cultural field in which justifications for local notions of legality were discovered. Analyzing early British narratives concerning travels in the Mughal Empire, he demonstrates how the British visions of Oriental effeminate luxury and barbaric despotism are located along a continuum, which is at once considered seductive to the British visitor but also a reverse picture of the legality that post-revolutionary Britain congratulated itself on. Highly readable and convincing, this essay would have, nonetheless, profited from a somewhat more extensive treatment of how the tropes discovered in the Mughal Empire specifically informed reflections on the presumed superiority of British legal culture.

Law’s Incursions into the Literary

Morris Kaplan’s important treatment of the Queensberry libel trial also explores the conflation of luxury (Oscar Wilde’s aesthetics, his texts, the scented rooms of his friend Alfred Taylor) and the sexually illicit as an antidote to respectable Britishness. Alone in the collection, Kaplan’s essay identifies how law impacts on literature and notions of what is literary. He suggests that barrister Sir Edward Carson – who defended Lord Queensberry in the initial libel charge brought against him by Wilde – successfully mapped the writer’s texts, with their imagined transgressions of sexual and class categories, onto his life. In effect, Carson made a legal case against the indeterminacy of literature, a position that Wilde defended. This arbitration of questions of literary value and interpretive contributed to Wilde’s later conviction, imprisonment, and pre-mature death. The paper goes farther than occasionally voyeuristic studies of the writer’s sexual life to demonstrate how the trials surrounding Wilde worked to constrain understandings of literature and literary interpretation. This constraint has had lasting effects on literary production and reception.

Marginalia

The most playful essay in the collection is Peter Goodrich’s. Goodrich was a former member of the Birkbeck School and is now a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. He has also authored a number of much-noted works on law and semiotics and the repressed psychoanalytic qualities of law including, but not limited to Languages of Law (1990), Oedipus Lex (1995), and Law in the Courts of Love (1996). Goodrich’s essay outlines his responses to a handwritten note that was made in the margin of the Melbourne University library’s copy of his first book Legal Discourse: Studies in Linguistics, Rhetoric, and Legal Analysis (1987). The note reads: »This book is written by a cunt of a bloke. Fucked if I can understand it«. The essay offers a fragmented meditation on the evolution of scholarly style and personal representation. Moreover, by insisting that the personal is relevant to a discussion of law it tests the limits of the scholarly essay and the turgid seriousness of most Law-and-Literature research, which, and hence its gravity, aims to critique law and legal theory. Overtly ›literary‹, the author’s style, with its use of parallelisms and repetitions, recalls eras in which scholarly prose was more consciously poetic or manneristic. (Judgment on this matter will depend on the reader’s stylistic sympathies). Not only does the essay critically scrutinize style and the worth of scholarly books on jurisprudence when words of love or hate, spoken face to face achieve more, but it also deflates itself. It suggests in postmodernist and deconstructive fashion that its meaning is to be found in its margins, if at all, and that communication altogether is a matter of mishap and happenchance success.

This essay, a self-announced fragment, is a world away from the seriousness of Williams’s jurisprudential analysis via the reverberations of a poem about war. It begins a series of brief papers, which, like much of the work in this volume challenge reader expectations, in this case the notion that scholarly essays should range between 6,000 and 10,000 words. Like the volume’s opening essay, its next to last one ponders on Blanchot, in this case performing jurisprudential analysis of the literariness of law:

Yet it is exactly the aspect of literature to which Plato would object, to its illimitable inventiveness and its quality of fiction, which impels law’s making, for law is only called upon to affirm some certainty in the face of uncertainty. (p. 145)

This meditation by Peter Fitzpatrick on death as the horizon of law is somewhat problematic. Like many secondary writings on the philosophy of Martin Heidegger, for instance, it is so imbued with the vocabulary of the thinker whose work it considers that it perpetuates a specific philosophical vernacular without pausing adequately to translate its own terms.

Julia Chryssostalis’ essay on the possibility of a conversation between law and literature suffers from its fragmented quality. Despite a conclusion, the ending appears to be missing. In an intriguing argument the author proposes to examine the relations between law, literature, and society within the metonymic field of a conversation. This should occur through an explication of the relations between the Antonio Tabucchi’s The Missing Head of Damasceno Monteiro (2000 [1997]) and the events of 1996 that inspired his writing the novel: A headless tortured corpse of a Portuguese man was discovered, and a trial was held in which a sergeant, who was initially protected by the police, was charged with killing and decapitating the suspect he had murdered. Chryssostalis proposes to demonstrate how The Missing Head connects Hans Kelsen’s formalistic legal theory and Kafka’s bloody apparatus (from The Penal Colony) via Lacan. This demonstration should then illustrate the dangers of abstract legalistic systems, be they Kantian moral universes or Kelsian jurisprudential ones. This is all quite commendable, but is attempted in too short a space, as if the author was racing towards the finish line. A return to the central argument for rethinking the relationship between law, society, and literature in conversational terms, unfortunately, is lacking.

A Non-Summarizing Endnote
rather than an Introduction

The endnote to this volume serves in place of an introduction. Stylistically, it subverts or delays reader expectations in a manner that underlines the »untoward« (p. 160) tone of its contributors. Written by Goodrich, the endnote echoes the notation made on his own text which he meditates on in his essay. Characteristically, the endnote does not aim at completeness, but puts five of the contributions into relation with each other, while ignoring three others – the fragments. A footnote tells us that this was due to deadlines and delays. Goodrich points out that the authors in the volume who are lawyers utilize the literary, whether this is conceived as a poem or a myth or a moment of insubordination, to poke holes in and interrupt the seeming impenetrability of law, (thus echoing Hanafin’s reading of Blanchot). They thus show law’s repressed qualities and the moments of spiritual crisis out of which its justifications of its own legality arise:

The lawyers in this volume all engage with literary texts as a way of challenging the stylistic, textual, and hedonic limits of law. They argue in variable forms that literature represents a fracture, a crisis, a puncture of the legal restraint of the text. (p. 161)

Goodrich proceeds to praise Booker, who, by contrast, as the lone literary scholar in the bunch, shows in his reading of O’Brien how an imagined version of law may deconstruct its own legality while simultaneously issuing judgment.

This intriguing volume – the reviewer’s enthusiasm is evident – exemplifies many differences between British Law-and-Literature scholarship as compared to American work. Readings are deconstructive; theoretical sources are located in Žižek, Goodrich, and Blanchot, as well as Lacan, Heidegger, and Derrida. A self-conscious interest in the post-colonial questions of aesthetic jurisprudence emerges, as does a focus on multiple poetic forms rather than the novel. The essays evidence an interest in challenging law not only with the mythic and deconstructive, the literary in the largest sense, but also in questioning whether the monotone quality of much jurisprudence is truly necessary. No coherent new theory of Law and Literature is propagated, nor wants to be proposed. Rather a variety of partial and partially contradictory scholarly trajectories are enunciated as possibilities. Goodrich’s essay is a case in point.

Because the authors are for the most part associated with Birkbeck, they write as in dialogue with each other, thus manifesting some of the conversational quality which Chryssostalis suggests as a model. This gives Law and Literature the focus and coherency that Literature and Law lacks. On the other hand, the dialogic quality of the Birkbeck volume may also render it somewhat hermetic. The authors speak to and quote each other frequently. One wonders if they are equally interested in inviting readers into their conversation. Readers uncomfortable with high theory will not feel at home within the pages of Law and Literature. Finally, the volume may lack a critical engagement with ideological components of the literary and its institutionalized, quasi-legal justifications of its own worth and meaning. Their interest is in critiquing the law.