“Reading as if for life”: Law and literature is more important than ever

• Published date: 29 February 2008
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00606-0
• Date: 29 February 2008
• Pages: 133-152
• Author: Teresa Godwin Phelps

‘‘READING AS IF FOR LIFE’’:

LAW AND LITERATURE IS

MORE IMPORTANT THAN EVER

Teresa Godwin Phelps

ABSTRACT

Over the past few decades, the law and literature movement has

fragmented, expanded, and evolved to include fields as diverse as

hermeneutics and narrative theory. This chapter discusses the develop-

ments in and contributions of these two strains of the law and literature

movement and argues that each respectively provides us with important

ways of seeing acts of interpretation and the use of stories in the legal

culture. Hermeneutics provides an understanding of the phenomenon of

interpretation that avoids the trap of choosing originalism or postmodern-

ism as the accepted method of interpreting legal texts. Narrative theory

provides tools for understanding and critiquing the burgeoning use of

stories in the law.

Early in Charles Dickens’ novel David Copperfield, David, trapped in the

‘‘gloomy theology of the Murdstones [which] made all children out to be a

swarm of little vipers,’’ and which, not surprisingly, made David’s life

Special Issue: Law and Literature Reconsidered

Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, Volume 43, 133–152

Copyright r2008 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 1059-4337/doi:10.1016/S1059-4337(07)00606-0

133

miserable, finds some solace in his late father’s small library. ‘‘From that

blessed room,’’ David (as Dickens’ first person narrator) relates,

Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, Humphrey Clinker, Tom Jones, the Vicar of

Wakefield, Don Quixote, Gil Blas, and Robinson Crusoe, came out, a glorious host, to

keep me company. They kept alive my fancy, and my hope of something beyond that

place and time y. This was my only and my constant comfort. When I think of it, the

picture always rises in my mind, of a summer evening, the boys at play in

the churchyard, and I, sitting on my bed, reading as if for life. (Charles Dickens,

1981, pp. 51–52)

‘‘The gloomy theology of the Murdstones,’’ alas, has reappeared, if indeed it

ever went away. And like David we may seek solace, and useful insights, in

literature. In the legal culture, in particular, the insights of the law and

literature movement have become more important than ever, offering

indispensable counterpoints to some of law’s gloomy ‘‘theologies.’’ Each of

us, unhappily, could choose a particular favorite from among the many

absolutisms (theologies) that characterize the legal community of the early

twenty-first century. In this chapter, I focus on two that I find particularly

troubling: first, sanctimonious pronouncements about the nature of ‘‘The

Law’’ and its interpretation and, second, ongoing, unspeakable, human

rights violations, often perpetrated within the confines of the law. What we

Americans have learned in the past few years, if we did not learn it from the

terrible history of the Holocaust, is that the law can justify anything. Seen as

abstract philosophical discourse divorced from the realities of life, the law

and its interpretation can be manipulated at will. It can justify extermina-

tions, disappearances, and torture.

So what has literature to do with this? How can literature possibly offer a

remedy to the malignities of the current legal culture? The law and literature

discipline to which I was introduced as a fledgling legal academic several

decades ago was largely constructed of looking at lawyer characters in

works of literature: the nobility of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird,

the tricky advocacy of Portia in The Merchant of Venice, the problematic

ethics of multiple lawyers in the stories of Louis Auchincloss. Left at that,

the discipline would have remained merely a piece of fluff in the law school

curriculum – a welcome break for former English majors who were tired of

reading cases. But legal scholars did not leave it at that. Instead, the

discipline deepened and fragmented into what is really a series of related

disciplines: fields as diverse as legal hermeneutics, narrative theory, and

linguistics. The developments in the law and literature movement over the

past few decades have been stunning in their complexity, their originality,

and their imaginative transfer of the many tools of the literary enterprise

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