Narrative, Authority, and Law
Author: Robin West
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 1993
Total Pages: 458
ISBN-13: 9780472103652
DOWNLOAD EBOOKChallenges the moral basis for the authority of law
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Law's Stories
Author: Peter Brooks
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 1996-01-01
Total Pages: 316
ISBN-13: 9780300146295
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThe law is full of stories, ranging from the competing narratives presented at trials to the Olympian historical narratives set forth in Supreme Court opinions. How those stories are told and listened to makes a crucial difference to those whose lives are reworked in legal storytelling. The public at large has increasingly been drawn to law as an area where vivid human stories are played out with distinctively high stakes. And scholars in several fields have recently come to recognize that law's stories need to be studied critically.This notable volume-inspired by a symposium held at Yale Law School-brings together an exceptional group of well-known figures in law and literary studies to take a probing look at how and why stories are told in the law and how they are constructed and made effective. Why is it that some stories-confessions, victim impact statements-can be excluded from decisionmakers' hearing? How do judges claim the authority by which they impose certain stories on reality?Law's Stories opens new perspectives on the law, as narrative exchange, performance, explanation. It provides a compelling encounter of law and literature, seen as two wary but necessary interlocutors.ContributorsJ. M. BalkinPeter BrooksHarlon L. DaltonAlan M. DershowitzDaniel A. FarberRobert A. FergusonPaul GewirtzJohn HollanderAnthony KronmanPierre N. LevalSanford LevinsonCatharine MacKinnonJanet MalcolmMartha MinowDavid N. RosenElaine ScarryLouis Michael SeidmanSuzanna SherryReva B. SiegelRobert Weisberg.
Constitutional Law as Fiction
Author: L. H. LaRue
Publisher: Penn State Press
Published: 2010-11-01
Total Pages: 172
ISBN-13: 0271039272
DOWNLOAD EBOOKStories of the Law
Author: Moshe Simon-Shoshan
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2012-03-30
Total Pages: 304
ISBN-13: 0199773734
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSimon-Shoshan examines the neglected genre of rabbinic legal stories, arguing that this genre is crucial to understanding both rabbinic jurisprudence and rabbinic story-telling and challenging traditional distinctions between law and literature.
Human Rights, Inc.
Author: Joseph R. Slaughter
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Published: 2009-08-25
Total Pages: 436
ISBN-13: 0823228193
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this timely study of the historical, ideological, and formal interdependencies of the novel and human rights, Joseph Slaughter demonstrates that the twentieth-century rise of “world literature” and international human rights law are related phenomena. Slaughter argues that international law shares with the modern novel a particular conception of the human individual. The Bildungsroman, the novel of coming of age, fills out this image, offering a conceptual vocabulary, a humanist social vision, and a narrative grammar for what the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and early literary theorists both call “the free and full development of the human personality.” Revising our received understanding of the relationship between law and literature, Slaughter suggests that this narrative form has acted as a cultural surrogate for the weak executive authority of international law, naturalizing the assumptions and conditions that make human rights appear commonsensical. As a kind of novelistic correlative to human rights law, the Bildungsroman has thus been doing some of the sociocultural work of enforcement that the law cannot do for itself. This analysis of the cultural work of law and of the social work of literature challenges traditional Eurocentric histories of both international law and the dissemination of the novel. Taking his point of departure in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Slaughter focuses on recent postcolonial versions of the coming-of-age story to show how the promise of human rights becomes legible in narrative and how the novel and the law are complicit in contemporary projects of globalization: in colonialism, neoimperalism, humanitarianism, and the spread of multinational consumer capitalism. Slaughter raises important practical and ethical questions that we must confront in advocating for human rights and reading world literature—imperatives that, today more than ever, are intertwined.
The Common Place of Law
Author: Patricia Ewick
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 1998-07-06
Total Pages: 342
ISBN-13: 9780226227443
DOWNLOAD EBOOKWhy do some people call the police to quiet a barking dog in the middle of the night, while others accept devastating loss or actions without complaint? Sociologists Patricia Ewick and Susan Silbey examine more than 400 case studies to explore the various ways the law is perceived and utilized, or not, by a broad spectrum of citizens.
Whispered Consolations
Author: Jon-Christian Suggs
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
Published: 2009-12-10
Total Pages: 416
ISBN-13: 0472022822
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAfrican Americans have experienced life under the rule of law in quite different contexts from those of whites, and they have written about those differences in poems, songs, stories, autobiographies, novels, and memoirs. This book examines the tradition of American law as it appears in African American literary life, from pre-Revolutionary murder trials to gangsta rap. The experience, and the critique it produces, changes our pictures of both American law and African American literature. This study reads the already canonical works of nineteenth- and twentieth-century black literature in the context of their responses to and critiques of American legal history. At the same time, it examines little known texts of African American life, from the urban humor of James D. Corrothers, through the early political essays of Chester Himes, to the adventures of black comic book heroes like Steel, Wise Son, and Xero. These are contextualized within specific legislation and case law, from the slave laws of early Virginia to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, from the case of Phillis and Mark in 1755 to the Simpson trials of the mid 1990s. Finally, the legal texts presented are themselves critiqued by the fictions and legal analyses of the African Americans who lived out their implications in their daily lives. Through a positing of the legal and cultural concepts of privacy, property, identity, desire and citizenship, and the romantic ideals of authenticity, irony, and innocence, Suggs is able to show how our understanding of American law should be influenced by African American conceptions of it as depicted through literature. This book will appeal to students and scholars of literary and cultural studies, law and literature, American history, as well as to scholars of African American literature and culture. Jon-Christian Suggs is Professor of English, John Jay College, City University of New York.
Cultural Analysis, Cultural Studies, and the Law
Author: Austin D. Sarat
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: 2003-07-03
Total Pages: 380
ISBN-13: 9780822331438
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDIVThis interdisciplinary collection demonstrates the purchase of cultural studies frameworks for thinking about legal questions beyond the reach of the Law & Economics framework./div
Law's Interior
Author: Kevin Crotty
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2018-10-18
Total Pages: 244
ISBN-13: 150172360X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn Law's Interior, Kevin M. Crotty draws on several important literary works to offer a new model of the relationship between citizens and their laws, one that emphasizes the power of law to shape citizens and to foster—or discourage—their autonomy. Crotty maintains that citizens are "inside" the law—they are the law's interior. Literature, he finds, can be relevant to law by emphasizing the connections between law and the world around it—a stance that corrects the tendency of legal theory to treat law as a separate, autonomous entity.The texts Crotty examines—Aeschylus' Oresteia, St. Augustine's Confessions, and the poetry of Wallace Stevens—question the rationalist optimism that Crotty regards as distorting much recent theorizing about law. Further, he asserts that the inability of courts to state clearly the principles animating their decisions demonstrates the stranglehold the positivist model has on us and our legal imaginations.Crotty sketches a model of the relation between citizens and laws that supplements the more familiar idea of law as something deliberated and enacted by rational, inherently autonomous citizens. The most important legal decisions of the past fifty years, Crotty says, rest on the perception that the state, far from merely respecting the "innate" autonomy of its citizens, actively shapes that autonomy. Law's Interior should contribute to a better understanding of the real principles underlying some landmark decisions by the Supreme Court.
Power and Legitimacy
Author: Anne Quéma
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
Published: 2015-01-01
Total Pages: 374
ISBN-13: 1442649038
DOWNLOAD EBOOKExamining modern jurisprudence theory, statutory law, and the family within the modern Gothic novel, Anne Quéma shows how the forms and effects of political power transform as one shifts from discourse to discourse.
