Kastner on Law and Literature

Tal Kastner, Rutegers Law School, is publishing Law and Literature in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Legal Theory and Philosophy (John Linarelli, ed.) (forthcoming). Here is the abstract.

Long eluding sharp definition, the interdisciplinary project of law and literature has, in recent years, evolved, expanded and flourished. Initially coalescing around scholarship concerned with ethics, hermeneutics, and narrative, law-and-literature studies have continued to develop in richness and nuance. Work in the field mobilizes varied interpretive tools to illuminate legal concepts, practices and structures along with literary and other cultural texts. Increasingly wide-ranging, scholarly approaches span temporal, geographic, cultural and social contexts. They include analyses of legal concepts through an historical lens that situates legal practices or understandings among other literary and cultural texts, mobilization of interpretive theory, philosophy and rhetoric to consider legal expression as functions of language in culture or illuminating ideologies or conflicts, and fresh readings of literature in light of legal concepts, among other interventions. With confluences among diverse methodologies and perspectives and by engaging adjacent fields, law-and-literature scholarship variously refracts the implications of law in culture and society.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.