New Directions in Law and Literature ed. by Elizabeth S. Anker and Bernadette Meyler (review)

Anker’s and Meyler’s volume is a collection of essays that emerged out of a conference on law and literature at Cornell University in the spring of 2013. The introduction offers a good assessment of the state of the art of law and literature as an interdisciplinary subject. As correctly stated in the introduction, this field of inquiry grew out of an anxiety about the two disciplines’ reciprocal deficiencies: frequent errors and miscarriages were perceived in the area of law, while literature felt the need to acquire a scientific perspective. Both disciplines exhibited the need for a hermeneutic approach and a new direction toward narrativity; both required an imaginative, cultural, and ethical dimension. However, from a literary perspective, I disagree with the editors’ assertion that the narrative approach can distort law while instead it is inherently salvific or ethical for literature. The narrative perspective is important to law, and I would argue that literature has provided law with emblematic cases that can better exemplify legal issues. It is my belief that literature is a corrective to law’s failures.

Indeed, that first umbrella definition of law and literature has become much broader and has problematized itself, branching out in many different interdisciplinary fields. Rather than literature tout court we now speak of culture as including law and the humanities. The volume correctly encourages going beyond the belief in a stable ontology in either discipline. The juridical approach to interdisciplinary fields underscores the fact that literature does not necessarily have practical effects on society; it is self-sufficient, while law exerts its influence in the real world. But this is objectionable if we think of how dangerous some books have been considered across the centuries, to the extent that they have often been burned and/or outlawed (as depicted in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, for instance). Books can have lasting effects in the real world.

But what are the possible new directions? What different itineraries can be foreseen? A focal point is the reinvention of the role of imagination and the turn to the visual. However, after all the research done in Europe concerning these two fields, we cannot say that the visual turn, for instance, is to be considered a new direction. Richard K. Sherwin’s two seminal books When Law Goes Pop (2000) and Visualizing Law in the Age of the Digital Baroque (2012) have underscored an important connection between law and the image or between law and the media. Many studies have already appeared concerning the use of visual means, such as videos (a new technological form of text) to advertise law. Peter Goodrich, one of the scholars featured in the volume, has devoted many essays and books on how law can be connected to images. Imagery is ingrained in legal language, says Goodrich. Legal processes and the norm need visibility. In the same way “performance” is a key word in many fields of the humanities and is part of cultural studies, it has also become a new perspective in legal studies. As performance entails a public exhibition before spectators, so, in the same way, trials have a theatrical aspect. Antoine Garapon devoted a fundamental book, Du bien juger (1997), to this legal aspect. Therefore, law and the performing arts share another, now well-established trend: dancing, for example, has been used as an art that translates the legal perspectives in texts into performance through space and the body.

In addition, the postcolonial turn cannot be considered a new direction, because the idea that law is oppressive and literature is liberating is a long established view, given contemporary postcolonial theory. Liberal critics argue that law is mistrusted because it has supported imperial domination.

The thriving field of interdisciplinary connections, which have branched out of the initial interdisciplinary field of law and literature, has challenged the pessimistic prognostics of some critics that the enterprise of law and literature was doomed to fail rapidly: the results...