Literary Criticisms of Law

Guyora Binder; Robert Weisberg

Published by Princeton University Press 2000

Literary Criticisms of Law

Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400823635

Overview
Contents

About this book

In this book, the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the emerging study of law as literature, Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg show that law is not only a scheme of social order, but also a process of creating meaning, and a crucial dimension of modern culture. They present lawyers as literary innovators, who creatively interpret legal authority, narrate disputed facts and hypothetical fictions, represent persons before the law, move audiences with artful rhetoric, and invent new legal forms and concepts. Binder and Weisberg explain the literary theories and methods increasingly applied to law, and they introduce and synthesize the work of over a hundred authors in the fields of law, literature, philosophy, and cultural studies.

Drawing on these disparate bodies of scholarship, Binder and Weisberg analyze law as interpretation, narration, rhetoric, language, and culture, placing each of these approaches within the history of literary and legal thought. They sort the styles of analysis most likely to sharpen critical understanding from those that risk self-indulgent sentimentalism or sterile skepticism, and they endorse a broadly synthetic cultural criticism that views law as an arena for composing and contesting identity, status, and character. Such a cultural criticism would evaluate law not simply as a device for realizing rights and interests but also as the framework for a vibrant cultural life.

Author / Editor information

Guyora Binder, Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is the author of Treaty Conflict and Political Contradiction and a coauthor of Criminal Law. Robert Weisberg, Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr., Professor of Law at Stanford University, is a coauthor of Criminal Law.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
CONTENTS Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
PREFACE Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
INTRODUCTION: Law as Literature Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
CHAPTER ONE. Interpretive Crises in American Legal Thought Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	28
CHAPTER TWO. Hermeneutic Criticism of Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	112
CHAPTER THREE. Narrative Criticism of Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	201
CHAPTER FOUR. Rhetorical Criticism of Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	292
CHAPTER FIVE. Deconstructive Criticism of Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	378
CHAPTER SIX .Cultural Criticism of Law Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	462
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	541

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