Law and Literature Movement

by Dave

This is a little outside our interests here at The Hog’s Head, but if you haven’t listened to The Philosopher’s Zone (produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation), it is certainly an interesting program. You can download episodes from the link in the program’s title above, or you can subscribe to it as a podcast through iTunes.

This episode runs through some details of something called the “Law and Literature Movement” in the American academy (I confess — I haven’t heard of it). The guest, Rob Atkinson, assesses the movement as extending in two different directions:

One is I would call the more formal approach, is to take the insights of literary criticism as a matter of form or interpretation or to fancy it up a bit, Hermeneutics, and apply those techniques used in reading, constructing, deconstructing literary text to parallel treatments of legal text. I don’t really do that formal side of things, I’m more on the substantive side which looks at the content of literature and tries to draw insights from law from the narrative, the characters, their development, their moral mistakes, their growth and development. So two sides to the movement, a formal side, sort of the interpretivist side and then a substantive side that looks at the content of the stories for insights, for law and lawyers. (Read the full transcript here)

Travis has touched on this in earlier posts/podcasts, that some of the laws from the Ministry of Magic smack of some interesting problems — not to mention the still troubling use of curses by the heroes in DH.

It’s interesting that Atkinson (a distinguished legal scholar from the University of Florida), at one point in the program, argues that the law is a “flexible instrument”, and not purely “black letter”.

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