Law and Literature

Third Edition

Richard A. Posner

    • Contents
    • Preface
    • Critical Introduction

      • Part I. Literary Texts as Legal Texts

    1. Reflections of Law in Literature
      Theoretical Considerations
      The American Legal Novel
      The Law in Popular Culture
      Camus and Stendhal
      Farcical Trials
    2. Law’s Beginnings: Revenge as Legal Prototype and Literary Genre
      The Logic of Revenge
      Revenge Literature
      The Iliad and Hamlet
    3. Antinomies of Legal Theory
      Jurisprudential Drama from Sophocles to Shelley
      Has Law Gender?
    4. The Limits of Literary Jurisprudence
      Kafka
      Dickens
      Wallace Stevens
    5. Literary Indictments of Legal Injustice
      Law and Ressentiment
      Romantic Values in Literature and Law
      Billy Budd, The Brothers Karamazov, and Law’s Limits
    6. Two Legal Perspectives on Kafka
      On Reading Kafka Politically
      In Defense of Classical Liberalism
      The Grand Inquisitor and Other Social Theorists
    7. Penal Theory in Paradise Lost
      The Punishment of Satan and His Followers
      The Punishment of Man
      The Punishment of the Animals

      Part II. Legal Texts as Literary Texts

    1. Interpreting Contracts, Statutes, and Constitutions
      Interpretation Theorized
      What Can Law Learn from Literary Criticism?
      Chain Novels and Black Ink
      Interpretation as Translation
    2. Judicial Opinions as Literature
      Meaning, Style, and Rhetoric
      Aesthetic Integrity and the “Pure” versus the “Impure” Style
      Two Cultures

      Part III. How Else Might Literature Help Law?

    1. Literature as a Source of Background Knowledge for Law
      Arch of Triumph
      From Huxley to The Matrix
    2. Improving Trial and Appellate Advocacy
      Sherlock Holmes to the Rescue?
      Legal Narratology
      Fictional Depictions of Lawyers
      The Funeral Orations in Julius Caesar
    3. But Can Literature Humanize Law?
      Aesthetic versus Moralistic Literary Criticism
      Then Why Read Literature?

      Part IV. The Regulation of Literature

    1. Protecting Nonwriters
      Pornographic Fiction
      Defamation by Fiction
    2. Protecting (Other) Writers
      What Is an “Author”?
      Copyright, Plagiarism, and Creativity
      Parody
    • Conclusion. Law and Literature: A Manifesto
    • 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.