New Directions in Law and Literature

Edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler

Features essays by 22 of the top scholars of law and literature
Addresses how developments within literary criticism and theory have transformed law and literature
Connects to current events such as police brutality, advances in biotechnology, marriage equality, and freedom of religion

New Directions in Law and Literature

Edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler

Description

After its heyday in the 1970s and 1980s, many wondered whether the law and literature movement would retain vitality. This collection of essays, featuring twenty-two prominent scholars from literature departments as well as law schools, showcases the vibrancy of recent work in the field while highlighting its many new directions.

New Directions in Law and Literature furnishes an overview of where the field has been, its recent past, and its potential futures. Some of the essays examine the methodological choices that have affected the field; among these are concern for globalization, the integration of approaches from history and political theory, the application of new theoretical models from affect studies and queer theory, and expansion beyond text to performance and the image. Others grapple with particular intersections between law and literature, whether in copyright law, competing visions of alternatives to marriage, or the role of ornament in the law's construction of racialized bodies.

The volume is designed to be a course book that is accessible to undergraduates and law students as well as relevant to academics with an interest in law and the humanities. The essays are simultaneously intended to be introductory and addressed to experts in law and literature. More than any other existing book in the field, New Directions furnishes a guide to the most exciting new work in law and literature while also situating that work within more established debates and conversations.

New Directions in Law and Literature

Edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler

Part One-Genealogies and Futures
1) Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler, "Introduction"
2) Brook Thomas, "Minding Previous Steps Taken"
3) Caleb Smith, "Who Wouldn't Want to Be a Person? Histories of the Present in Law and Literature"
4) Austin Sarat, "From Charisma to Routinization and Beyond: Speculations on the Future of the Study of Law and Literature"

Part Two-Methods
5) Martin Jay Stone, "There's No Such Thing as Interpreting a Text"
6) Peter Brooks, "Retrospective Prophecies: Legal Narrative Constructions"
7) Ravit Reichman, "Law's Affective Thickets"
8) Janet Halley, "Paranoia, Feminism, Law: Reflections on the Possibilities of Queer Legal Studies"
9) Lorna Hutson, "Proof and Probability: Law, Imagination and the Forms of Things Unknown"
10) Bernadette Meyler, "Law, Literature, History: The Love Triangle"
11) Peter Goodrich, "Pictures as Precedents: The Visual Turn and the Status of Figures in Judgments"
12) Julie Stone Peters, "Law as Performance: Historical Interpretation, Objects, Lexicons, and Other Methodological Problems"
13) Elizabeth S. Anker, "Globalizing Law and Literature"

Part Three-Cases
14) Anne Cheng, "Ornament and Law"
15) Imani Perry, "The Flowers Are Vexed: Gender Justice, Black Literature, and the Passionate Utterance"
16) Eric Cheyfitz and Shari Huhndorf, "Genocide by Other Means: U.S. Federal Indian Law and Violence Against Native Women in Louise Erdrich's The Round House"
17) Elliott Visconsi, "Pluralism, Religion, and Democratic Culture: Nadeem Aslam's Maps for Lost Lovers"
18) Elizabeth Emens, "Regulatory Fictions: On Marriage and Countermarriage"
19) Simon Stern, "Legal and Literary Fictions"
20) Paul Saint-Amour, "Copyright and Intellectual Property"
21) Priscilla Wald, "Replicant Being: Law and Strange Life in the Age of Biotechnology"
22) Wai Chee Dimock, "Weak Reparation: Law and Literature Networked"

Acknowledgments
Contributors
Bibliography
Index

New Directions in Law and Literature

Edited by Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler

Author Information

Elizabeth S. Anker is Associate Professor of English and Associate Member of the Faculty of Law at Cornell University. Her first book is Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature (Cornell 2012), and her edited collection Critique and Postcritique (with Rita Felski) is forthcoming in March 2017 with Duke University Press. She is completing two books, On Paradox and Our Constitutional Metaphors.

Bernadette Meyler is the Carl and Sheila Spaeth Professor of Law at Stanford University, where she writes and teaches on English and American constitutional law and law and the humanities. She was previously a Professor of Law and English at Cornell University and has published widely in both law reviews and peer reviewed journals. She is currently completing two books--Common Law Originalism and Theaters of Pardoning.

Contributors:

Elizabeth S. Anker
Peter Brooks
Anne Cheng
Eric Cheyfitz
Wai-Chee Dimock
Elizabeth Emens
Peter Goodrich
Janet Halley
Shari Huhndorf
Lorna Hutson
Bernadette Meyler
Imani Perry
Julie Stone Peters
Ravit Reichman
Paul Saint-Amour
Austin Sarat
Caleb Smith
Simon Stern
Martin Jay Stone
Brook Thomas
Elliott Visconsi
Priscilla Wald