The law-and-literature movement claims to have introduced a valuable pedagogical innovation into legal study: instructing students in techniques of literary analysis for the purpose of interpreting laws and in the reciprocal use of legal analysis for the purpose of interpreting literary texts. The results, according to advocates, are not only conceptual breakthroughs in which he systematically refutes the writings of its leading legal scholars and cooperating literary critics.
Critiquing the movement’s assumption that lawyers can offer special insights into literature that deals with legal matters, Posner points out that writers of literature use the law loosely to convey a particular idea, or as a metaphor for the workings of the society envisioned in their fiction. Legal questions per se, about himself vulnerable to Posner’s devastating remark that “any argument can be analogized to a legal dispute.’’
Similarly, the notion that literary criticism can be helpful in interpreting law is problematic. Posner argues that literary criticism in general aims at exploring richness and variety of meaning in texts, whereas legal interpretation aims at discovering a single meaning. A literary approach can thus only confuse the task of like deconstruction, which holds that all texts are inherently uninterpretable.
Nevertheless, Posner writes that law-and-literature is a field with “promise.” Why? Perhaps, recognizing the success of a movement that, in the past, has singled him out for abuse, he is attempting to appease his detractors, paying obeisance to the movement’s institutional success declaring that it “deserves a place in legal research” while law-and-literature and as a tribute to the power it has come to exercise in academic circles.
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