Stern on Law, Literature, and the Legal Imagination @simon8.bsky.social @ArsScripta

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Law, has published Law, Literature, and the Legal Imagination. Here is the abstract.

Law and literature occupies an unusual place among the interdisciplines in the legal academy. Various interdisciplinary conjunctions have found a home on law faculties over the last half-century or so, such as law and economics, law and sociology, and law and psychology, more recently supplemented by law and neuroscience. Most law professors could summarize the aims of scholarship fairly accurately in these areas. Law and literature has had a place in the legal academy for about the same amount of time, and yet those who do not read current scholarship in this field tend to have a vague or even misinformed understanding of what the work entails. Having outlasted the many predictions of its demise, the field nevertheless suffers from a strange kind of identity crisis—not because of anxieties or doubts among those who write in this area, but because of confident but misguided accounts that others would offer when describing the field. This article seeks to explain why this particular disciplinary conjunction differs from others that thrive on law faculties. The first part of the discussion takes its point of departure from James Boyd White’s The Legal Imagination. I offer a few observations about White’s book in relation to the field of law and literature, and as the subject of a symposium like the one being hosted in these pages. My point in this first part is a simple one, namely that very few books by law professors have achieved a status that makes them appropriate for such an anniversary symposium, and most of them have been interdisciplinary in a way that makes them resemble the kind of humanities scholarship that more typically receives this kind of attention. The second part of the essay considers the trajectory of law and literature as a field over the last forty-some years. Here the discussion contrasts the state of the field as evidenced by work in flagship U.S. law journals, by contrast with other scholarly work published elsewhere. The point again is a simple one, namely that if one were to look only at flagship U.S. law journals, the field might appear to be in a state of decline, whereas if one looks more widely, the field is flourishing and expanding. If the field looks different, depending on this schematic division of publication venues, the contrast hints at diverging views about literature, legal scholarship, and their aims. Those views have some bearing on the status of law and literature in relation to other legal interdisciplines, such as the ones mentioned at the outset.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.