Law and Literature: Third Edition

Law and Literature: Third Edition

Richard A. Posner

Language: English

Pages: 592

ISBN: 0674032462

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


Hailed in its first edition as an “outstanding work, as stimulating as it is intellectually distinguished” (New York Times), Law and Literature has handily lived up to the Washington Post’s prediction that the book would “remain essential reading for many years to come.” This third edition, extensively revised and enlarged, is the only comprehensive book-length treatment of the field. It continues to emphasize the essential differences between law and literature, which are rooted in the different social functions of legal and literary texts. But it also explores areas of mutual illumination and expands its range to include new topics such as the cruel and unusual punishments clause of the Constitution, illegal immigration, surveillance, global warming and bioterrorism, and plagiarism.

In this edition, literary works from classics by Homer, Shakespeare, Milton, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, and Camus to contemporary fiction by Tom Wolfe, Margaret Atwood, John Grisham, and Joyce Carol Oates come under Richard Posner’s scrutiny, as does the film The Matrix.

The book remains the most clear, acute account of the intersection of law and literature.

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p. 42; “What Has Modern Literary Theory to Offer Law?” 53 Stanford Law Review 195 (2000); “The Law of the Beholder,” New Republic, Oct. 16, 2000, p. 49; The Economic Structure of Intellectual Property Law, chs. 2, 6 (2003) (coauthored with William M. Landes); “The End Is Near,” New Republic, Sept. 22, 2003, p. 31; Public Intellectuals: A Study of Decline, ch. 6 (paperback ed. 2003) (“The Literary Critic as Public Intellectual”); “CSI: Baker Street,” New Republic, Oct. 11, 2004, p. 47; “Classic

the history of the American Civil War at a small college and lives on a ramshackle but pricey property in Long Island, subsisting mainly on the income from a trust fund. His grandfather, like Oliver Wendell Holmes, was a Civil War veteran and Supreme Court Justice. His father is a 97-­year-­old federal district judge in South Carolina who has been nominated for promotion to the federal court of appeals. Nonagenarian judges are not promoted, so here is an early clue that the novel has fantasy

few more questions and down ­comes the curtain. (p. 347) But as with most other works of imaginative literature that take law for their theme, the heart of this fascinating novel lies elsewhere than in its critique of law. The impression that lingers is of hapless characters caught in the webs of modern American trash culture (of which law is one), rather than of the webs themselves. The Law in Popular Culture Although it is a distinguished satiric novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities is a work

the Bishop of Senlis’s horse”—provoking the inquisitor to reply abruptly: “This is not a police court. Are we to waste our time on such rubbish?” (p. 120). A cleric named Ladvenu is sympathetic to Joan. He asks, “Is there any great harm in the girl’s heresy? Is it not merely her simplicity?” To this the inquisitor replies with the same kind of “slippery slope” argument that we remember from Henry Wilcox in Howards End: If you had seen what I have seen of heresy, you would not think it a light

East, and his minister Mephostophilis, and furthermore grant unto them that four and twenty years being expired, and these articles above written being inviolate, full power to fetch or carry the said John Faustus, body and soul, flesh, blood or goods, into their habitation wheresoever. By me, John Faustus. At the end of the play the 24 years are up and a posse of devils appears and carries Faustus off to hell. As the maker of an immoral contract Faustus is a parallel fig­ure to Shylock.

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