• To do Justice!  “That’s not my job, my job is to apply the law,” famously retorted Oliver Wendell Holmes. Hence the conventional view of law: we apply known rules to guide conduct and make results predictable. Justice is secondary, if it concerns us at all. But this view disappoints, leaves us cold. We need to commit ourselves to seeking justice. We need a live debate about fairness and reason in law. We share responsibility for justice, not to hide behind our professional masks, our lawyerly jargon, and our habitual responses to legal problems. We should not leave justice to lawyers only, certainly not of the Holmes variety, but should include other voices. Literature offers many wise voices. We should listen to them.

• To know injustice. Stories focus on particular, concrete instances of injustice. It is easier to know injustice than justice. Broad legal generalizations and rules can seem vapid, incomplete by comparison. Exposing ourselves vicariously through literature to concrete harm, loss and unfairness refines our sense of injustice. Such exposure tests our general legal propositions. And it prompts us to imagine how law might change to rectify injustice. Telling stories can ignite our moral imaginations.

• To stop cruel formalism. Forms used to seek justice can themselves be infected with cruelties and frailties that produce injustice. We must examine our legal system’s penchant for formulaic, pat approaches to legal problems. We must counter consistency, predictability and efficiency with the realities – if not virtues – of flux and uncertainty at the core of most efforts to seek justice. This is not to deny the preeminent values of our legal system, but rather to embrace the humility that should accompany our various legal forms, procedures and rules. Literature can chasten and instruct us.

See Outside The Law: Narratives on Justice in America by Susan Richard Shreve and Porter Shreve, Editors (Beacon Press Boston, 1997) (My summary above draws from and distills the book’s introduction by Martha Minow).