ICYMI: Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature (OUP, 2017) @OxUniPress

ICYMI: Fatal Fictions: Crime and Investigation in Law and Literature (Alison L. LaCroix, Richard H. McAdams, and Martha C. Nussbaum, eds., Oxford University Press, 2017).\ Here is a description of the book's contents from the publisher's website.

Writers of fiction have always confronted topics of crime and punishment. This age-old fascination with crime on the part of both authors and readers is not surprising, given that criminal justice touches on so many political and psychological themes essential to literature, and comes equipped with a trial process that contains its own dramatic structure. This volume explores this profound and enduring literary engagement with crime, investigation, and criminal justice. The collected essays explore three themes that connect the world of law with that of fiction. First, defining and punishing crime is one of the fundamental purposes of government, along with the protection of victims by the prevention of crime. And yet criminal punishment remains one of the most abused and terrifying forms of political power. Second, crime is intensely psychological and therefore an important subject by which a writer can develop and explore character. A third connection between criminal justice and fiction involves the inherently dramatic nature of the legal system itself, particularly the trial. Moreover, the ongoing public conversation about crime and punishment suggests that the time is ripe for collaboration between law and literature in this troubled domain. The essays in this collection span a wide array of genres, including tragic drama, science fiction, lyric poetry, autobiography, and mystery novels. The works discussed include works as old as fifth-century BCE Greek tragedy and as recent as contemporary novels, memoirs, and mystery novels. The cumulative result is arresting: there are "killer wives" and crimes against trees; a government bureaucrat who sends political adversaries to their death for treason before falling to the same fate himself; a convicted murderer who doesn't die when hanged; a psychopathogical collector whose quite sane kidnapping victim nevertheless also collects; Justice Thomas' reading and misreading of Bigger Thomas; a man who forgives his son's murderer and one who cannot forgive his wife's non-existent adultery; fictional detectives who draw on historical analysis to solve murders. These essays begin a conversation, and they illustrate the great depth and power of crime in literature.

Chapter 1. Scott Turow, On My Careers in Crime

Part I: Criminal Histories
Chapter 2. Daniel Telech, Mercy at the Areopagus: A Nietzschean account of Justice and Joy in the Eumenides
Chapter 3. Barry Wimpfheimer, Suborning Perjury: A Case Study of Narrative Precedent in Talmudic Law
Chapter 4. Alison LaCroix, A Man for All Treasons: Crimes By and Against the Tudor State in the Novels of Hilary Mantel
Chapter 5. Marina Leslie, Representing Anne Green: Historical and Literary Form, And the Scenes of the Crime in Oxford, 1651
Chapter 6. Richard Strier & Richard McAdams, Cold-Blooded and High Minded Murder: The Chapter 7. Pamela Foa, What's Love Got To Do With It? Sexual Exploitation in Measure for Measure: A Prosecutor's View


Part II: Race and Crime 
Chapter 8. Justin Driver, Justice Thomas and Bigger Thomas
Chapter 9. Martha Nussbaum, Reconciliation Without Anger: Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country

Part III: Responsibility and Violence 
Chapter 10. Saul Levmore, Kidnap, Credibility, and The Collector.
Chapter 11. Jonathan Masur, Premeditation and Responsibility in The Stranger
Chapter 12. Saira Mohamed and Melissa Murray, Walking Away: Lessons from Omelas
Chapter 13. Mark Payne, Before the Law: Imagining Crimes against Trees

Part IV: Suspicion and Investigation 
Chapter 14. Caleb Smith, Crime Scenes: Fictions of Security in the Antebellum American Borderlands 
Chapter 15. Steven Wilf, The Legal Historian as Detective 

Index

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.