Hummel on Music of the Law: A Wigmorian Playlist for a Modern Era @josephhummel.bsky.social

Joseph Hummel, UNT Dallas College of Law, has published Music of the Law: A Wigmorian Playlist for a Modern Era at 59 Tulsa Law Review 301 (2024). Here is the abstract.

Within the field of law and literature, the academic study of legal songs—those being songs about lawyers, trials, the law, legal procedure, and broader issues of justice—remains relatively underdeveloped when compared with the study of legal novels, plays, and films. Given the value legal songs can provide to lawyers, this need not and should not be the case. For the lawyer, the benefits of listening to and studying legal songs are many. Legal songs can help lawyers understand the public’s perception of lawyers and the law. Listening to legal songs can also help lawyers improve their linguistic and interpretative skills. Legal songs also offer the lawyer a portal to understanding their clients and those “others” situated outside of or on the periphery of society. Lastly, legal songs can help lawyers re-engage with their “humanistic roots” and ethics. Using Dean John Henry Wigmore’s and Professor Richard Weisberg’s “lists of legal novels” as foundational and structural tools, this article endeavors to create a “Wigmorian playlist” of forty curated legal songs that, to borrow a phrase from Wigmore, no lawyer can “afford to ignore.” Using overarching criteria similar to those set out by Wigmore and Weisberg, this article catalogues and examines songs that centrally and significantly depict: (1) lawyers or other members of the legal profession; (2) trials or other legal proceedings; (3) issues of civil or criminal procedure; (4) laws and legal instruments; and (5) crimes or broader issues of law and justice that also implicate criteria (1), (2), (3), or (4). The article contains five sections. Part I is the Introduction. Part II discusses the evolution of the law and literature movement and explores its expansion through the twentieth century to include non-literary mediums, including music. Part III explores music’s connection to the law and argues that legal songs hold professional and personal value for lawyers and warrant from them engagement and analysis commensurate with the degree that lawyers might expend on legal novels, plays, and films. Part IV discusses the selection criteria for the “playlist.” Part V contains the “Wigmorian playlist.”

Download the article from SSRN at the link.