Capers on Wright's Native Son

Professor I. Bennett Capers (Hofstra Law School) has posted The Trial of Bigger Thomas: Race, Gender, and Trespass, 31 NYU Review of Law and Social Change 1 (2006) on SSRN.

Abstract:

This article examines Richard Wright's Native Son - which ends with its
protagonist Bigger Thomas awaiting execution for the rape and murder of
a white woman - to offer three interrelated close readings that go
beyond the usual law-and-literature approaches. It examines the three
"real life" cases that informed Wright as he was writing Native Son -
the trial of Robert Nixon, the Scottsboro Boys case, and the prosecution
of Leopold and Loeb - and demonstrates that Native Son, more than simply
problematizing criminal justice issues, foregrounds the way in which
society and the law actively participate in the construction(s) of race
and gender, and challenges the traditional utilitarian and retributive
justifications for punishment. The article posits that the real crime
motivating Bigger's prosecution is not murder and rape, but a violation
of what the author terms the "white letter law" of "trespass."

Although the text that motivates the article is Native Son, the goal of
the article is significantly larger. Much of the criticism of the
law-and-literature movement centers around claims that it lacks
discipline and boundaries. Through its explication of Native Son, this
article redirects such thinking about law-and-literature by suggesting
that only wider landscapes, a new critical geography, will reinvigorate
the discipline.