Literature in Law - Judicial Method, Epistemology, Strategy and Doctrine.

The flourishing interdisciplinary field of law and literature typically takes as its focus the capacity of literary works to offer new perspectives on legal context, to supplement the law, and to speak truth to power. 2 For William MacNeil, whether we are talking about the nineteenth century novel or Game of Thrones, cultural representations stage jurisprudential arguments and illuminate sociolegal trends. Law and legal theory are critical lenses through which to understand literary and cultural texts.3 For Melanie Williams, novels and poetry provide a locus of insight into both the human condition and legal predicament, bringing home the stakes of legal argument and exposing its claims to a more sophisticated understanding. For Wai-Chee Dimock, literature is the genre that unsettles judgment and resists the kind of neat closure which law seeks. The nature of judgment, then, is not just literature’s object, but its subject. As a supplement, then, literature does not complete the project of law but challenges and pluralises it. So too in some of my own recent work, it is not the ideas or narratives of literary works, so much as their form and style, that draw us both deeply and problematically into the lives of others.4 The monologue of the law is set against the novel’s polyphony and pluralism