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LAW AND LITERATURE: INTRODUCTION Introduction: pp. 461-464Since Professor James Boyd Whites The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of

Legal Thought and Expression , legal theory has seen a resurgence of attention toliterature and methods of literary analysis.

Historically, a significant body of literary works by poets, playwrights, and novelistsdepicted lawyers and legal procedures or illustrated legal principles.In the early twentieth century, occasional interest centered on examining the intersectionof the disciplines. John Wigmore called for lawyers to be aware of significant works of fiction, and published a suggested reading list of novels with legal thematic content.Benjamin Cardozos 1925 essay Law and Literature analyzed the literary styles of

judicial opinions and advised that understanding of judicial styles could assist instructuring effective rhetorical appeals to courts.The renewed attention to law and literature in the 1980s has been less theoretical andmore a collection of explorations into the various intersections of the disciplines.The turn to narrative has gained impetus from other areas of jurisprudential scholarship:

critical race theory, feminist theory, and Theoretical work in clinical legal education.

The former two schools emphasize the significant political importance of personalexperiences and nontraditional views or different voices.Clinical teaching theory recognizes that lawyering is an oral tradition of storytelling,which necessarily focuses on individuals in different, contextualized settings.Professor Charles R. Lawrence III, writes, Litigation is highly formalized storytelling.The scholarly exchanges center in three areas:

law in literature, law as literature, and Storytelling.

Examinations of law in literature look at representations of laws, lawyers or legalsystems in fiction for a number of purposes.It compares legal and literary texts to elucidate something about the enterprise of law or legal theory.For instance, moral values in literature can assist judges in deciding ethical dilemmas.Substantive works of literature can promote understanding of constitutional principles byillustrating problems that ought to be recognized as universal struggles.In addition to looking at literature for assistance on the decisional level, some studyliterature for illumination on the theoretical level.Works of literature illustrate the normative construction of the legal universe.

James Boyd White explains: As the object of art is beauty and of philosophy truth, theobject of rhetoric is justice: the constitution of a social world. Others hope to gain the objectivity and distance that a vehicle of fiction provides or theattitudes it might inspire.They believe that studying literature promotes contextualization and teaches empathy:Literature helps us understand others. Literature helps us sympathize with their pain, ithelps us share their sorrow, and it helps us celebrate their joy. It makes us more moral. Itmakes us better people.

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A recent incarnation suggests that the legal profession is and can be shaped by literature.Literature is instructive to lawyers and scholars because it leads away from a view of lawas formal, mechanized rule-making, and leads to all the possibilities, probabilities,ambiguities, and doubts that life possesses.Scholars studying law as literature explore the possibilities of interpreting legal texts

as works of literature.They evaluate argumentation as rhetoric and apply traditional methods of literary analysisto legal texts.A principal set of questions includes:

whether texts have determinate, objectively identifiable meanings; whether the meaning of a text should coincide with the authors intent; and Whether readers, in the process of interpretation, are free to assign meaning to

texts.Legal theorists debate whether methods of literary criticism have any place in legaltheory, and their positions range along a continuum.At one end of the spectrum are textualists.

Texts, according to this view, are capable of only a narrow range of possible legitimateinterpretations.At the other extreme are those who argue that texts, and perhaps all utterances, aresubject to various indeterminacies of meaning. Some of these theorists contend that noobjective meaning resides within texts, but that meaning is manufactured significantly or exclusively by the interpreter.In the middle are those who maintain that there are some social, contextual, and linguisticconstraints on interpretation. While multiple interpretations are possible, the range of interpretive authority is limited by widely shared conventions of language, beliefs,assumptions, traditions, techniques, and standards of a community of interpreters.Law and interpretation theorists do not all self-arrange neatly onto this continuum. Some

draw on particular traditions or styles of interpretation, such as philosophicalhermeneutics, rhetoric or deconstruction.A third area of intersection between law and literature is in storytelling , on re-imagining, perhaps, law through literature.Storytelling is not limited to depictions of law in fiction it incorporates stories into law.In law review articles and essays, legal books and speeches authors are telling storiesabout individual experiences, parables that encompass imaginative visions, and anecdotesto inspire empathy and encourage recognition of shared concerns.Through stories, legal actors are seen in a human, individualized context; the emotional

backdrop or human voice, missing from doctrines and rules, is supplied.Many of these stories take place at an allegorical level, and some of them, at least

formally, do not seem to be about law at all. Narrative also has methodological importance: some suggest that telling the stories of theunderprivileged or outsiders will have a counterhegemonic effectwill undermine theofficial stories that are the backdrop for traditional doctrines, which are blind tooppression and deprivation.Storytelling is a reconstructive force: through stories people imagine possible worlds, andso construct them.

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