Law and Literature: A Growing Attention

Dr Alka Singh
Assistant Professor of English
Department of Humanities and Other Studies
Dr RML National Law University Lucknow

Law and literature are quite intertwined. Literature has its own law but many a times the law of
the land affects the flow of literature, and it is the literature that moves the law maker to mould it
from time to time.

When we talk of law and literature , we refer to an interdisciplinary study .It examines the issues
and patterns related and at crossing edge in the both fields concerned. In the contemporary
academic environment, at advanced level of legal studies, the interrelation between law and
literature is quite frequent in the syllabus.
In the world academia, the relationship of Law and literature saw its seeding roughly
from the 1990’s. Major academic journals in the field concerned referred to the English classics
by William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens. The traces of law and literature relationship in
western philosophical though stand with Greek philosopher Plato, who
recognized a relationship between law and literature more than two thousand years back. He
writes that
"a society's law book should, in right and reason, prove, when we open it, far the best and finest
work of its whole literature."
West's Encyclopedia of American Law, writes that
“in 1908 the connection between law and literature was reexamined by the preeminent legal scho
lar JOHN H. WIGMORE, whonoted the prevalence of trials and legal themes in many of the world's
famous novels (see Wigmore 1908, 574). In 1925Justice BENJAMIN N. CARDOZO, of the U.S. Supr
eme Court, published in the Yale Law Review a groundbreaking article titled"Law and Literature,
" which examined the literary styles of judicial opinions.”
The volume further mentions,
“In the 1960s and 1970s, the ideas of Wigmore and Cardozo formed the foundation of the moder
n law and literaturemovement. During this period law was widely perceived as a myopic, rule-
oriented vocation that lacked basic human qualitiessuch as sympathy and empathy. A growing nu
mber of law students, lawyers, and judges became disenchanted with thelimited perspective of th
eir profession, and began exploring other fields of learning for enlightenment. At the same time,
highschool teachers, college professors, and graduate students began to migrate from the humanit
ies to the legal profession insearch of more practical employment opportunities.”
The construct of Law and literature spans in three directions , to mention here:
law in literature.
law as literature
law and literature
The field Law in Literature explores the trajectories of Law in the genres of literature.
The trajectories of law as literature
undertake the “the educational aspects of actual trials that involve recurring
legal disputes over issues such as race relations and the proper role of law enforcement in a free s
ociety. This second areaof study also analyzes the prose and rhetoric that judges use to explain th
e legal arguments and conclusions in their judicialopinions.” (West's Encyclopedia of American
Law,)
The construct of law and literature
“ compares and contrasts the analytical tools each discipline employs when
interpreting a particular text, whether it be a constitution, a statute, a judicial precedent, or a wor
k of literature.”

There are immense horizons to understand legal studies. The rules, codes and statutes through
literature and must be given due care from the stakeholders’ perspectives. The power of
literature and the different forms of high and low culture prepare a base for a law student to
understand the intricacies involved in the relationship between law and justice. I find Richard
Possner’s established text Law and Literature of extreme importance when it comes to
understand that literature has plethora of thoughts that condition the mind of an individual in
order to partake and be part of the society and contribute to the systems of the world in general
and legal world, in particular. In this line of argument critics like Kornstein , Dworkin and Simon
Lee and Jeanne Gaekeer seem well symbolic in putting forward proposals that establish the
significant relation to study law through literature .

The paper focuses on interpreting the postulates laid down by the aforementioned texts by the
authors in question.

On The question of Law and Literature , A.P. Shah is former Chief Justice of the Delhi High
Court and former Chairman of the Law Commission has to say:

Just as the law has fascinated writers over centuries, many writers have also themselves
been lawyers, or at least trained in the law, including some of the best-known names such
as Sir Walter Scott, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Kafka. In India, some of the most powerful
writing, which has both political and literary merit, has come from people trained in the
law, such as Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay who wrote ‘Vande Mataram’, among many
other works, and was a Deputy Magistrate. P.L. Deshpande, the great Marathi writer,
studied law but never practised. Another novel that blends both law and literature is that
of Mani Shankar Mukherjee, who wrote under the pseudonym of Shankar and
publishedKato Ajanare which centred round his real-life experience as a clerk to Barrister
Noel Frederick Barwell. The novel brings together true stories — some of them reported
judgments — into a fictional space and experiences at Calcutta High Court.
Referring to the styles of Judgement writing , Justice Shah gives the reference from Justice V.R.
Krishna Iyer

In his famous judgment on the question of remission of life convicts in Maru Ram v. Union of
India, he began with the following beautiful description: “A procession of ‘life convicts’ well
over two thousand strong, with more joining the march even as the arguments were on, has
vicariously mobbed this court, through the learned counsel, carrying constitutional missiles in
hand and demanding liberty beyond the bars. They challenge the vires of s. 433A of the Criminal
Procedure Code (Procedure Code, or short) which compels ‘caging’ of two classes of prisoners,
at least for fourteen eternal infernal years, regardless of the benign remissions and compassionate
concessions sanctioned by prison law and human justice. Their despair is best expressed in the
bitter lines of Oscar Wilde: ‘I know not whether Laws be right, or whether Laws be wrong, All
that we know who lie in gaol, Is that the wall is strong; And that each day is like a year, A year
whose days are long.’

Works cited and consulted

http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/the-links-between-law-and-
literature/article19951335.ece

Cardozo, Benjamin N. 1925. "Law and Literature." Yale Law Review 14.
Fischer, John. 1993. "Reading Literature/Reading Law: Is There a Literary Jurisprudence?" Texa
s Law Review 72.
Koffler, Judith. 1989. Review of Forged Alliance: Law and Literature and Law and Literature:
A Misunderstood Relation, byRichard A. Posner, and Interpreting Law and Literature: A Herme
neutic Reader, edited by Sanford Levinson and StevenMailloux. Columbia Law Review 89.
Posner, Richard A. 1995. "Judges' Writing Styles: Do They Matter?" University of Chicago Law
Review 62.
——. 1988. Law and Literature: A Misunderstood Relation. Boston: Harvard Univ. Press.
Wigmore, John L. 1908. "A List of Legal Novels." Illinois Law Review 2.
<a href="https://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/Law+and+Literature">Law and
Literature</a>.West's Encyclopedia of American Law, edition 2. Copyright 2008 The Gale
Group, Inc.