lawyers and literature

Exercise 1-3: Assumptions about Literature

"In his memoir, ‘The Dogwood Tree: A Boyhood,' John Updike comments on the innocence of his youthful assumptions about art, religion and politics, yet as a man he reports he has found no certain substitute for those assumptions." [William H. Pritchard, English Papers: A Teaching Life 1 (Saint Paul: Graywolf Press, 1995)]

What assumptions about literature do you bring with you to this course of reading? In what sense would you describe your assumptions as innocent?

If asked to describe yourself as a reader of literature, how would you try to do so?

What sets literature apart from other writings? From journalism, for example? Why should literature include Shakespeare and exclude the daily newspaper? Are judicial opinions better considered as literature or journalism?

How do you respond to James Boyd White's claim that law is literature? White argues that

to read the law as if it were literature, that is to ask of this apparently nonliterary discourse questions about tone, character, form, and structure that are drawn from the reading of literature, may do much to lead us both to a clearer sense of the special resources and limits of this discourse and to a clearer sense of the possibilities of our own art. The object is not to deny what is special about the law but to understand it more clearly. [James Boyd White, What Can a Lawyer Learn from Literature?, 102 Harv. L. Rev. 2014, 2023, n. 51 (1989)]

 

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