Law and Literature
by Kenji Yoshino

Balzac once famously said that he liked women's hair and that he liked soup, but not women's hair in his soup. Some might say the same of law and literature – that each enterprise is valuable, but that combination yields no improvement. In these two seminars, I will attempt to explore the source of such resistance, and then to outline how it might be productively overcome.

Law and literature have a vexed relationship to each other because each enterprise is simultaneously similar to and different from the other. On the one hand, both law and literature are interpretive, rhetorical, textual practices. On the other hand, confusion between the two is dangerous, because law can have violent consequences that do not obtain in literature. For this reason, law (broadly construed) has repeatedly banished literature (broadly construed) both imaginatively and literally. In the first session, I will lecture about this relationship, thinking about Plato's banishment of the poet from the city alongside the Supreme Court's banishment of overly "literary" statements like Victim Impact Statements – a banishment, as we shall see, that is always fraught and incomplete. I will demonstrate that we have transhistorical evidence that "law and literature" will always rightly be a more vexed enterprise than other interdisciplinary fields such as law and economics, legal history, or jurisprudence.

In the second session, I will turn from the anxieties that attend the field to the possibilities it opens for us. I will elaborate a taxonomy of four different branches of law and literature projects:  law "as" literature (looking at the rhetorical and narrative dimensions of legal texts); law "through" literature (applying techniques of reading developed in literature to read legal texts); law "of" literature (the legal regulation of literary texts through obscenity or copyright regimes); and law "in" literature (the representation of law in literary texts).