3 Reasons We Need Law and literature

November 24, 2012 by Leave a Comment
  • 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).

Filed Under: Legal Thinking, Rhetoric, Storytelling, Values Tagged With: , , ,

Why Law and Literature?

November 9, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Simply put, law and literature helps law students and lawyers achieve the following laudable goals:

  1. To become better at persuading – especially writing. The best writer often prevails in our legal system.
  2. To make sure our persuasion satisfies high ethical standards. Never sacrifice your ethics to win.
  3. 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.
  4. To look outside the strictly legal domain for perspective on law – we can’t solve a problem from within that problem.
  5. 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.

Filed Under: Legal Thinking, Rhetoric, Values, Writing Tagged With: , , , ,

Write with Style

July 15, 2012 by Leave a Comment

Scholar Helen Sword studied as many writing guides as she could lay her eyes on. She saw six points of unanimous advice:

1. Clarity, Coherence, Concision: write sentences that are clear, coherent, and concise.

2. Short or Mixed-Length Sentences: write short sentences or vary sentence rhythm with alternating short and long sentences.

3. Plain English: avoid ornate, pompous, Latinate, and waffly prose.

4. Precision: avoid vagueness and imprecision.

5. Active verbs: active verbs should dominate your writing; use passive verb constructions sparingly.

6. Tell a story: create a compelling narrative.

On drafting sentences, in particular, she offers three guiding principles:

1. Employ plenty of concrete nouns and active verbs, especially when writing about abstract concepts.

2. Keep the nouns and verbs close together in your sentences, so that readers know “who’s kicking whom.” In other words, keep the actor and the action close together; express the crucial actions in verbs and the central characters (real or abstract) in subjects.

3. Avoid clutter: keep your sentences free from extraneous words and phrases.

How to put these principles regularly in play? Sword offers help here too.

1. Check the health of your sentences by pasting them to http://www.writersdiet.com. The “WritersDiet” test will categorize your sentences as “flabby” or “fit.”

2. Replace at least a few “be” verbs (be, been, is, are) with active verbs.

3. Identify your passive constructions and decide whether they add syntactical variety or offer other justification for inclusion. Too many passive phrases wilt the sentence.

4. Make sure at least one sentence per paragraph contains a concrete noun or human entity as its subject, immediately followed by an active verb.

5. A noun and its accompanying verb should pack a quick, one-two punch. Readers lose interest when more than a dozen or so words separate the actor (subject or noun) from the action (verb).

6. When writing about inanimate abstractions, still use active verbs to “animate” them.

7. Cut down on prepositional phrases, especially when they string together long sentence with abstract nouns.

8. When possible, explain abstract concepts using concrete examples (which, for brevity’s sake, I’ve violated in this very blog post!)

As many writers before Ms. Sword have pointed out: there is no writing, there is only re-writing. And, I would add, reading about re-writing. On that score, we should all read (and re-read) Ms. Sword’s engaging practical guide, “Stylish Academic Writing.”

Filed Under: Legal Thinking, Rhetoric, Writing Tagged With: , ,
«Previous Page