Teaching Business Law from Literature: Lessons to Be Learned from the Novel Mildred Pierce and the Road to Entrepreneurial Success

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/jlse.12051
• Date: 01 July 2016
• Author: Joseph Labatt,Michael Forrest
• Published date: 01 July 2016

Journal of Legal Studies Education

Volume 33, Issue 2, 361–377, Summer 2016

Teaching Business Law from

Literature: Lessons to Be Learned

from the Novel Mildred Pierce and the

Road to Entrepreneurial Success

Joseph Labatt∗and Michael Forrest∗∗

I. INTRODUCTION

Students want more than training from a dry textbook. Why not give them war

stories from the trenches of business? As one story goes, Warren Buffett took a

guided tour of San Simeon,1the legendary castle of William Randolph Hearst,

founder of the Hearst newspaper empire. Buffett viewed castle buildings

chock full of art and antiquities collected by the acquisitive Hearst.2One can

easily imagine Buffett’s tour guide expounding on Mr. Hearst’s purchases:

Mr. Hearst acquired that vase in Ravello. Mr. Hearst bought that statue in Verona,

etc. Buffett, bored by the accounts of how Hearst parted with his money,

finally exclaimed, “Don’t tell us how he spent it; tell us how he made it!”3

Devotees of American business success stories and curious business stu-

dents can appreciate Buffett’s sentiment. For them, the acquisition of money

is a far more enlightening tale than its expenditure. This is not to discount

novels such as F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby and its account of Jay

Gatsby’s meretricious lifestyle that he bankrolls by wealth from questionable

∗Assistant Professor of Business Law at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio,

Texas.

∗∗Professor of Business Law at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio, Texas.

1ROGER LOWENSTEIN,BUFFETT:THE MAKING OF AN AMERICAN CAPITALIST 88 (2008).

2See Jeffrie G. Murphy, Freedom of Expression and the Arts,29ARIZ.ST. L.J. 549, 558 (1997) (de-

scribing in unflattering terms Hearst’s penchant for collecting art).

3LOWENSTEIN,supra note 1, at 88.

C2016The Authors

Journal of Legal Studies Education C2016Academy of Legal Studies in Business

361

362 Vol. 33 / The Journal of Legal Studies Education

sources.4Gatsby certainly lives large on Long Island. But perhaps more worth-

while to the budding entrepreneur are lessons on how to make money from

business, which is the success story James M. Cain tells in his novel Mildred

Pierce.5As the old saying goes, Cain allows the reader to watch the sausage

being made—or in the case of Mildred, smell her pies being baked.

Generally speaking, novels with stories about businesses usually provide

scant useful detail on the actual day-to-day moneymaking activity of the enter-

prise. American business novels typically deal with “business” only indirectly,

as the backdrop to someone’s great wealth or the cause of conflict between

characters. Sinclair Lewis’s Dodsworth is the story of an auto manufacturer who

sells his successful business to travel the world with his harpy of a wife.6Yet the

reader of Dodsworth learns little about the actual affairs of Sam Dodsworth’s

business other than what the author dispatches in a couple paragraphs of

a 360-page novel. Likewise, Lambert Strether, in Henry James’s The Ambas-

sadors,7is a successful manufacturer, but the reader is never given details on

the specific product he makes—save that it is “vulgar.”8

Noticeably absent in American business novels are the lawyers who assist

the business owner or entrepreneur and the business law they practice. This

omission is particularly unfortunate, because it limits students of business law

to textbooks or case studies as the main textual sources on the subject. Case

studies are really story skeletons—opposing parties and fact patterns—rather

than characters and interaction. The value of the novel as a teaching tool

comes from the ongoing characters with whom students can identify and

the business “story” that brings concepts alive such as personal liability and

bankruptcy.

4F. SCOTT FITZGERALD,THE GREAT GATSBY (1925); see Douglas H. Frazer, James Bond or Jay Gatsby,

WIS.LAW., June 2103, at 31 (describing Gatsby as “a fabulously wealthy, handsome, well-dressed,

and ambitious businessman whose background is a bit of a mystery”).

5JAMES M. CAIN,MILDRED PIERCE (1989) (originally published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1941).

The book is about a depression-era divorced woman who fights her way out of the lower middle

class by successfully running restaurant and catering businesses.

6SINCLAIR LEWIS,DODSWORTH (1947) (telling the story of the travels of an American businessman

and his wife to Europe, which negatively affects their relationship); see Ira Lurvey & Selise

E. Eiseman, Divorce Goes to the Movies, 30 U.S.F. L. REV. 1209, 1212 n.22 (1996) (describing the

film version of the novel Dodsworth).

7HENRY JAMES,THE AMBASSADORS (1930) (describing how an American businessman goes to

Europe to retrieve the wayward son of a rich widow).

8Id. at 39.