Simply put, law and literature helps law students and lawyers achieve the following laudable goals:
- To become better at persuading – especially writing. The best writer often prevails in our legal system.
- To make sure our persuasion satisfies high ethical standards. Never sacrifice your ethics to win.
- To give us a vocabulary to explain our dissatisfaction with much legal analysis. Law’s conceptual tools alone do not explain justice and injustice. We need more.
- To look outside the strictly legal domain for perspective on law – we can’t solve a problem from within that problem.
- To allow a more nuanced, sophisticated appreciation of ambiguity in law. Ambiguity about factual matters, about indeterminacy in legal decisions, and about what constrains our courts in interpreting and applying law.
These are just a few of law-lit’s contributions to the intellectual and moral lives of all those who care about law and justice.
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