Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-p9bg8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-25T08:52:23.641Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Neo-Marxists, Nietzscheans, and New Critics: The Voices of the Contemporary Law and Literature Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  20 November 2018

David Ray Papke
Get access

Abstract

An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content.
Image of the first page of this content. For PDF version, please use the ‘Save PDF’ preceeding this image.'
Type
Review Essays
Information
American Bar Foundation Research Journal , Volume 10 , Issue 4 , Fall 1985 , pp. 882 - 897
Copyright
Copyright © American Bar Foundation, 1985 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

1 Auerbach, Jerold S., Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America 14–101 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976); Robert Stevens, Law School: Legal Education in America from the 1850s to the 1980s 3–111 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983).Google Scholar

2 Ferguson, Robert A., Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984).Google Scholar

3 The earliest reaction I have located is Eugene Wambaugh, Light Reading for Law Students, 2 Law Bull. St. U. Iowa 28 (1892).Google Scholar

4 Wigmore, John H., A List of Legal Novels, 2 Ill. L. Rev. 574 (1908).Google Scholar

5 Id. at 575.Google Scholar

6 Id. at 579.Google Scholar

7 Id. at 566.Google Scholar

8 G. Edward White, The American Judicial Tradition: Profiles of Leading American Judges 255 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976).Google Scholar

9 Hellman, George S., Benjamin N. Cardozo: American Lawyer 14 (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co., 1940).Google Scholar

10 Law and Literature, 14 Yale Rev. 699 (1925). The essay was subsequently reprinted in 1925 Conn. B.A. Rep. 90 (1925); 52 Harv. L. Rev. 471 (1939); 22 Law. J. 1 (1957); and also in Benjamin N. Cardozo, Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1931); and Selected Writings of Benjamin Nathan Cardozo, ed. Margaret Hall (New York: Fallon Publications, 1947).Google Scholar

11 “As I search the archives of my memory, I seem to discern six types or methods which divide themselves from one another with measurable distinctness. There is the type magisterial or imperative; the type laconic or sententious; the type conversational or homely; the type refined or artificial, smelling of the lamp, verging at times upon preciosity or euphuism; the type demonstrative or persuasive; and finally the type tonsorial or agglutinative, so called from the shears and pastepot which are its implements and emblem.” Law and Literature and Other Essays and Addresses, supra note 10, at 10.Google Scholar

12 Auchincloss, Louis, Life, Law and Letters 50 (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1979). For further comments by Auchincloss on Cardozo's own literary style, see David Ray Papke, The Writer on Wall Street: An Interview with Louis Auchincloss, ALSA F., spring 1981, at 5, 9.Google Scholar

13 Weisberg, Richard H., Law, Literature and Cardozo's Judicial Poetics, l Cardozo L. Rev. 283 (1979).Google Scholar

14 New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921.Google Scholar

15 New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960.Google Scholar

16 Louis J. Blom-Cooper, ed., The Language of the Law: An Anthology of Legal Prone (New York: Macmillan Co., 1965); Edmund Fuller, ed., Law in Action: An Anthology of Law in Literature (New York: Crown Publishers, 1947); Maximilian Koessler, ed., Masterpieces of Legal Fiction (Rochester, N.Y.: Lawyers Co-operative Publishing Co., 1964); Francis L. Windolph, ed., Reflections of the Law in Literature (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1956).Google Scholar

17 For a listing of twentieth-century law and literature scholarship published prior to 1980, see David R. Papke, Law and Literature: A Comment and Bibliography of Secondary Works, 73 Law Libr. J. 421 (1980).Google Scholar

18 Ives, C. B., “Billy Budd” and the Articles of War, 34 Am. Lit. 311 (1962); Ledbetter, Jack W., The Trial of Billy Budd, 58 A.B.A. J. 614 (1972); Marlene Longenecker, Captain Vere and the Form of Truth, 14 Stud. Short Fiction 337 (1977); Reich, Charles, The Tragedy of Justice in “Billy Budd,” 56 Yale Rev. 368 (1967); Sten, Christopher W., Vere's Use of the “Forms,” 47 Am. Lit. 37 (1975); Wallace, Robert K., “Billy Budd” and the Haymarket Hangings, 47 Am. Lit. 108 (1975).Google Scholar

19 Griffin, S. Bell, Style in Judicial Writing, 15 J. Pub. L. 214 (1966); Fallon, Perlie P., The Relation Between Analysis and Style in American Legal Prose, 28 Neb. L. Rev. 80 (1948); Henson, Ray D., A Study in Style: Mr. Justice Frankfurter, 6 Vill. L. Rev. 377 (1961); Irving Younger, On Judicial Opinions Considered as One of the Fine Arts, 51 U. Colo. L. Rev. 341 (1980).Google Scholar

20 Weisberg, Richard H. & Kretschman, Karen L., Wigmore's “Legal Novels” Expanded: A Collaborative Effort, 50 N.Y. St. B.J. (1978).Google Scholar

21 Smith championed and wrote the preface for an early law and humanities symposium that emphasized law and literature, 29 Rutgers L. Rev. 223 (1976).Google Scholar

22 The Coming Renaissance in Law and Literature, 30 J. Legal Educ. 13 (1979).Google Scholar

23 See Papke, , supra note 17, at 421, 427.Google Scholar

24 ALSA F., spring 1981, at 1; 6 ALSAF. 125 (1983); 32 Rutgers L. Rev. 603 (1979); 60 Tex. L. Rev. 373 (1982).Google Scholar

25 Smith, Carl S., John P. McWilliams, Jr., & Maxwell Bloomfield, Law and American Literature: A Collection of Essays (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1983). For an appropriately grumpy review of this volume, see Koffler, Judith S., Reflections on Detente: Law and Literature, 62 Tex. L. Rev. 1157 (1983).Google Scholar

26 Miller, J. Wesley, Legal Resources for Literary People: A Hornbook-Key in a Nutshell, 7 ALSA F. 41 (1983).Google Scholar

27 Domnarski, William, Law-Literature Criticism: Charting a Desirable Course with “Billy Budd,” 34 J. Legal Educ. 702(1984).Google Scholar

28 Richard Weisberg and Jean-Pierre Barricelli continue to find the traditional axes useful. In their essay “Literature and Law,” they distinguish between “the law in literature” and “the law as literature.” Jean-Pierre Barricelli & Joseph Gibaldi, eds., Interrelations of Literature (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1982).Google Scholar

29 60 Tex. L. Rev. 373 (1982). Two of the articles in the symposium have prompted subsequent commentary. See Schelly, Judith M., Interpretation in Law: The Dworkin-Fish Debate (Or, Soccer Among the Gahuka-Gama), 73 Calif. L. Rev. 158 (1985).Google Scholar

30 Roberto Mangabeira Unger, in his article The Critical Legal Studies Movement, 96 Harv. L. Rev. 561 (1983) has designated two tendencies in the Critical Legal Studies Movement, namely, the structuralist and the Marxian-Weberian, but for Critical Legal Studies outsiders it is the latter that is most obvious.Google Scholar

31 A voluminous recent compilation of Critical Legal Studies writings includes at most only a half-dozen articles that might be considered law and literature scholarship. Duncan Kennedy & Karl E. Klare, A Bibliography of Critical Legal Studies, 94 Yale L.J. 461 (1984).Google Scholar

32 For a description of the legal studies program at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, see Peter d'Errico et al., Humanistic Legal Studies at the University of Massachusetts, 28 J. Legal Educ. 18 (1976).Google Scholar

33 Until 1984 this journal was known as the ALSA Forum. Its renaming was accompanied by the adoption of a new format, the naming of a permanent editor, and the establishment of a refereeing process for submissions.Google Scholar

34 Although the Gramscian concept of hegemony is much used, Gramsci himself did not develop the concept at length in any one writing. References to hegemony are dispersed throughout the most important collection of his writings, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare & Geoffrey N. Smith (New York: International Publishers, 1982).Google Scholar

35 Kennedy, Duncan, Antonio Gramsci and the Legal System, 6 ALSA F. 32 (1982).Google Scholar

36 A Critical Anatomy of the Legal Opinion, ALSA F., fall 1980, at 5, 10.Google Scholar

37 Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature 45–54 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).Google Scholar

38 Id. at 55–74.Google Scholar

39 The Concept of Ideology and Its Applicability to Law and Literature Studies, ALSA F., spring 1981, at 29.Google Scholar

40 Id. at 37.Google Scholar

41 Capital in Hell: Dante's Lesson on Usury, 32 Rutgers L. Rev. 608 (1979).Google Scholar

42 Fleurs du Mal: Literary Stultification in Law, ALSA F., spring 1981, at 23.Google Scholar

43 See, e.g., The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (1872).Google Scholar

44 Thus Spoke Zarathustra (published in several parts: 1883, 1884, 1892); Beyond Good and Evil (1886); Genealogy of Morals (1887); Twilight of the Idols (1889).Google Scholar

45 Haven, New, Conn.: Yale University Press.Google Scholar

46 97 Harv. L. Rev. 4 (1983).Google Scholar

47 Hogler, Raymond L., Conrad, Kafka and the Criminal Justice system, 3 J. Contemp. L. 75 (1976); Saul Touster, Law at the Bar of Literature: Some Aspects of Dostoyevsky and Brecht, ALSA F., spring 1981, at 13; Richard H. Weisberg, Comparative Law in Comparative Literature: The Figure of the Examining Magistrate in Dostoevski and Camus, 29 Rutgers L. Rev. 237 (1976).Google Scholar

48 Haven, New, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984.Google Scholar

49 Id. at 1–3.Google Scholar

50 White was affiliated with the University of Colorado School of Law from 1967 to 1974 and then with the University of Chicago Law School from 1974 to 1983. At present he is professor of law, English, and classical studies at the University of Michigan.Google Scholar

51 The New Criticism (Norfolk, Conn.: New Directions, 1941).Google Scholar

52 Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1973.Google Scholar

53 Id. at xi.Google Scholar

54 Ball, Milner S., Book Review, 44 U. Chi. L. Rev. 681, 694 (1977); Weisberg, Richard, Book Review, 74 Colum. L. Rev. 327, 337 (1974); White, G. Edward, Book Review, 50 Va. L. Rev. 374, 382 (1974).Google Scholar

55 Vinson, Kenneth, Book Review, 2 Fla. St. U.L. Rev. 827, 827 (1974).Google Scholar

56. White's argument in this regard is greatly influenced by so-called reader-response criticism that appeared in many theoretical studies of the 1960s and 1970s. Examples include Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973); Jonathan D. Culler, Structuralist Poetics: Structuralism, Linguistics and the Study of Literature (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1975); Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978); and Norman N. Holland, The Dynamics of Literary Response (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).Google Scholar

57 17 U.S. (4 Wheaton) 316 (1819).Google Scholar

58 John Henry Schlegel, Searching for Archimedes—Legal Education, Legal Scholarship, and Liberal Ideology, 37 J. Legal Educ. 103, 103 (1984).Google Scholar

59 One critic argues that sensitizing students to metaphor may be the basis of a new approach to legal education. Murray, James E., Understanding Law as Metaphor, 34 J. Legal Educ. 714, 730 (1984).Google Scholar