Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature [repost]

Great literature can be the means of understanding as well as creating our world—by teaching and reinforcing society's laws, articulating its values, and enforcing the social contracts that unite us as a culture. What if literature itself generated our ideas and feelings about justice, marriage and family, property, authority, race, or gender? What if it enflamed our determination to pursue justice—or, conversely, undermined our ability to detect injustice?

What if law in all its variations—from religious commandments to oral tradition to codified statute—embraced its own narrative assumptions to the point of absorbing purely literary conventions as a means of more forcefully arguing its points in the legal arena?

And what if this dynamic relationship between written and unwritten laws and literature is constantly evolving? How do law and literature influence or reflect one other? And what lessons might we draw from their symbiotic relationship?

Representing Justice: Stories of Law and Literature is a provocative exploration of just such questions—an examination of the rhetorical and philosophical connections that link these two disciplines.

Lectures:
1 Literature as Law, Literature of Law
2 The Old Testament as Law and Literature
3 Revenge and Justice in Aeschylus’s Oresteia
4 Community in Sophocles’s Oedipus Tyrannus
5 Ritual Order in Mystery and Morality Plays
6 Chaucer’s Lawyers and Priests
7 Inns of Court, Royal Courts, and the Stage
8 Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice (1596–97)
9 Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603–04)
10 Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale (1609–11)
11 An Epic Trial—Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667)
12 Moll Flanders (1722); Beggar’s Opera (1727)
13 Trial Tales of Parricide Mary Blandy (1752)
14 Property and Self—Edgeworth, Burney, Austen
15 Law as Fog—Dickens’s Bleak House (1852–53)
16 Puritans Anew—The Scarlet Letter (1850)
17 Slavery and Huckleberry Finn (1885)
18 Victorian Limits—Tess and Jude the Obscure
19 Susan Glaspell’s “Jury of Her Peers” (1917)
20 Kafka and 20th-Century Anxiety about Law
21 Lolita (1958) and the Art of Confessing
22 “Witnessing” Slavery in Beloved (1987)
23 Maternal Infanticide—Myth and Judgment
24 Literature and Law—Past, Present, Future