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Lawyers and Literature
James R. Elkins
the course
| spring | 2019 |
"The issue is no longer whether reading
literature should be part of the lawyer's training. Rather,
the issue is how we can best read law-related literature
to make us better lawyers."
--William
Domnarski, Law-Literature Criticism: Charting a Desirable
Course with Billy Budd, 34 J. Legal Educ. 702 (1984)
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The course website provides extensive commentary on and about Lawyers
and Literature. On the course website, you will also find,
for many of the assignments, especially for readings we pursue early
in the course, web resources associated with the week's assigned
readings.
I expect you to have questions about the stories (and the poetry)
we read--why are we doing this kind of reading in law school?--and
that you will have questions about why we read the stories the way
(the several ways) we will try to read them. To put these questions
in the context of the course, I have tried to put myself in your
shoes and ask: What are we doing here? What is Lawyers
and Literature all about? As part of this
syllabus, and the introduction to the course, you are invited to
peruse a "little book" that I have compiled to help you
get oriented. I have given the book a tentative title: Stories
in the Education of a Lawyer. Here is the table of contents
of the book:
Cover
| Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Guide
to Reading Stories in The Education of a Lawyer
I have organized the chapters in
Stories in the Education of a Lawyer in a way that fits my
eye, and my thinking about the course. The chapters could, without
ill-effect, be organized and read much differently. The chapters
are linked (and sometimes overlapping) but they would, I think,
make perfectly good sense if they were read in random order.
For readers who want a more detailed preview of what
is to be found in Stories in the Education of a Lawyer, I
have prepared a brief reading guide: Guide
to Reading Stories in The Education of a Lawyer.
What will we do in Lawyers and Literature?
I expect that we will, in some fashion or other
consider the possibilities and obstacles to learning about ourselves
as lawyers from literature;
identify strategies we use as readers when we confront and try to
understand a story;
learn something about the dynamics of pedagogical/literary conversation
by which we try to put lawyer stories to use;
puzzle over the relation of the "fictional" and "real"
dimensions of the lawyers we find in the stories we read and in
the lives we live as lawyers;
investigate, with the help of the stories we read, how legal education--how
being a lawyer--opens up and closes down important aspects of minds
and our lives;
acknowledge the existence of contemporary lawyer poets, and peruse
enough of their poetry to give us a first look at how poetry works.
The psychologist, Jerome Bruner, argues that we should
"constantly be inquiring about the interaction between the powers
of individual minds and the means by which the culture aids or thwarts
their realization." Bruner contends that this inquiry "will
inevitably involve us in a never-ending assessment of the fit between
what any particular culture deems essential for a good, or useful,
or worthwhile way of life, and how individuals adapt to these demands
as they impinge on their lives." [Jerome Bruner,
The Culture of Education 13 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard
University Press, 1996)]. The legal profession is, by some
accounts, a distinct culture which aids and thwarts the realization
of individual minds and lives. Lawyers and Literature examines,
from a literary perspective, how a lawyer's life is enriched and diminished
by the very culture that makes it possible.
What will we read in Lawyers and Literature?
--a tentative outline--
Course Readings
Short Stories
J.S. Marcus, "Centaurs" in J.S. Marcus, The Art of
Cartography 17-23 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1991)
selected stories in Lowell B. Komie, The Legal Fiction of Lowell
B. Komie (Chicago: Swordfish/Chicago, 2005)
"Weight," in Margaret Atwood, Wilderness Tips 163-178
(New York: Bantam Doubleday Dell, 1990)
"Let's Do," in Rebecca Meacham, Let's Do 63-86
(Denton, Texas: University of North Texas Press, 2004)
"Puttermesser: Her Work History, Her Ancestry, Her Afterlife,"
in Cynthia Ozick, The Puttermesser Papers 3-19 (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1997)
selected lawyer stories in John William Corrington, The Collected
Stories of John William Corrington (Columbia: University of
Missouri Press, 1990)
A Novel
Leslie Hall Pinder, On Double Tracks (Toronto: Lester &
Orpen Dennys Ltd., 1990)
Two Novellas
Herman Melville, "Bartleby, the Scrivener," in Jay Wishingrad
(ed.), Legal Fictions: Short Stories about Lawyers and the Law
224-258 (Woodstock, New York: The Overlook Press, 1992)
"The Death of Ivan Ilych," in Leo Tolstoy, The Death
of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories 95-156 (New York: New American
Library, 1960)
Poetry
selected poetry in James Clarke, The Juried Heart (New
York: Pleasure Boat Studio, 2015) [republished in Canada under the
title Oblique Verdicts (Ontario: Exile Editions, 2017)] [foreword
to both the U.S. and Canadian editions by James R. Elkins]
Questions emerge when you read the stories you are invited to read
in the course: What is this story doing here? What am I
supposed to do with this story? What do I have to say
about this story? How can this story be read and put
to use in my education as a lawyer? When questions of this
kind emerge, raise them, see that they get addressed.
Admittedly, these questions raise still more basic questions:
How do I read? How am I to try to read this story? In thinking
about these basic questions you may find it interesting, as
you begin to think about the course, to reflect on the s-t-r-a-t-e-g-i-e-s
you use in reading.
Reading Strategies
Assignments will be marked on the Lawyers and Literature
course website assignments page with double purple bullets: .
In addition to the assigned literary readings, you may find it helpful
in preparation for class discussion (and in your writing for the course)
to peruse the Instructor's Notes that accompany many of the assigned
readings. The Instructor's Notes will include references to web resources
that you may find useful.
If you attempt to access anything on the course website and find the
link inoperative, please notify me by email and I will try to promptly
correct the problem.
Web resources on the course website are indicated with a "web
resources" image:
Web resources are not assigned reading. I should note
that I do not present web resources with the idea that they provide
precise guidance on how to read, or how to work with a particular
story. The web resources provide information about authors and critical/scholarly
commentary on the assigned texts. Many of the linked web resources
will be of more interest to graduate students in literature than to
law students. The collected web resources provide a somewhat different
context for what we read in the course.
If, during the course of your reading and web browsing,
you find web resources of interest to the class, please pass them
along and I'll make them available, either by announcement, or by
adding them to the relevant "web resources" page of the
course website.
After each week of classes, I will update the assignments page and
will add the completed week's assignment to the Assignments
Archive page (which you can access from the homepage of the course
website).
If you have questions or concerns about, or proposals for readings,
you are welcome to consult with me. I will, barring unforeseen circumstances,
promptly reply to email messages. I will be delighted to meet with
you and discuss the readings, the course, and your writing for the
course.
My office is: Rm 110. Drop me a note by email for an appointment.
I can usually be found in my office before class, and I am always
available after class. .
I have not addressed, in this part of the syllabus, the means and
method by which your work in the course will be evaluated. For this
information, I refer you to the course website: Evaluation
Lawyers and Literature Home Page
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