Law and Literature

Revised and Enlarged Edition

Richard A. Posner

    Preface

    Introduction

    PART 1: LITERARY TEXTS AS LEGAL TEXTS

    1. The Reflection of Law in Literature

    Theoretical Considerations

    The American Legal Novel from Twain to Grisham

    Camus and Stendhal

    2. Revenge as Legal Prototype and Literary Genre

    Revenge as a Practice

    Revenge Literature

    The Iliad and Hamlet

    3. The Antinomies of Legal Theory

    Jurisprudential Drama from Sophocles to Shelley

    Has Law Gender?

    4. The Limits of Literary Jurisprudence

    Kafka

    Dickens

    Wallace Stevens

    5. The Literary Indictment of Legal Injustice

    Law and Ressentiment

    Romantic Values in Literature and Law

    Billy Budd and The Brothers Karamazov

    Literature and the Holocaust

    6. Two Legal Perspectives on Kafka

    On Reading Kafka Politically

    In Defense of Classical Liberalism

    The Grand Inquisitor and Other Social Theorists

    PART 2: LEGAL TEXTS AS LITERARY TEXTS

    7. Interpreting Contracts, Statutes, and Constitutions

    Interpretation Theorized

    What Can Law Learn in the Schools of Literary Criticism?

    Chain Novels and Black Ink

    Interpretation as Translation

    8. Judicial Opinions as Literature

    Meaning, Style, and Rhetoric

    Aesthetic Integrity and the "Pure" versus the "Impure" Style

    Two Cultures

    PART 3: THE LITERARY TURN IN LEGAL SCHOLARSHIP

    9. The Edifying School of Legal Scholarship

    A Literary Education for Lawyers?

    Pornographic Literature

    10. Lies like Truth? Narrative Legal Scholarship

    The Legal Narratology Movement

    Judicial Biography

    PART 4: THE REGULATION OF LITERATURE BY LAW

    11. Authorship, Creativity, and the Law

    What Is an "Author"?

    Defamation by Fiction

    Copyright and Creativity

    Parody

    Index

  • Cover: Law and Literature
  • A photo of the author

Richard A. Posner is Circuit Judge, the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, and a senior lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School.