The Cultural Background of 'The Legal Imagination'

Abstract

This paper is an exploration of the cultural circumstances in which modern law and literature arose, in the middle third of the last century. The argument is that the connections between law and literature were surprising, because law thought of itself as an autonomous field of practice and thought; they were unsurprising, at least in retrospect, because that very legal culture was deeply rhetorical in nature, as legal thought had been for hundreds of years, a fact that invited comparison with other forms of persuasion, argument, narration, and thought. The lawyer's task was in some sense to define the meaning both of the legal past and of the events or facts in the immediate case, with the object of doing this as well as possible. As for literary criticism, that was a field largely grounded in close reading, the object of which was reach sound judgments about quality, and to express and justify them in writing that was worthy of the task, all with the object of doing these things as well as possible. In these respects literary criticism was similar to law, also a field of reading, understanding, judging, and expressing. These fields were neighbors without knowing it. When put side by side they generated many of the questions to which scholarship in the field of law and the humanities has since been devoted.

Keywords: Law and literature, law and humanities, culture, legal imagination

JEL Classification: K19