What motivates judges when they decide a case? Do they primarily follow the
letter of the law? To what extent are they moved by other complex
pressures—including personal, political, religious, and social—and even the
pressure or spell of language itself? By studying short stories, novels,
plays, and legal cases, this course will look at legal and literary judges
and the effect their attitude towards authority, human emotion, and language
have on their decisions.

Why law and literature? Judges and kings, like poets and storytellers,
struggle in similar ways to give shape to human experience. They use similar
narrative techniques to tell their tale, or to make their case. But judges,
because of their professional commitment to the law, choose rhetorical
strategies that sometimes make their decisions seem harsh, arbitrary, or
mechanical. Those of us outside the law rarely have a chance to see how
judges arrive at their decisions. The fictions we read will allow us to look
behind the scenes—to look, for example, at concerns common to narrators in
both fields: the conflict between the individual and society, the influence
of the past (i.e. private and public history, and legal precedent), sources
of textual meaning, and questions concerning morality and human motivation.
The legal cases (probably 2) will allow us to look closely at the way our
legal system works and to explore how society, through its literature as
well as its actions, responds to the principles, practices, images, and
language of that system.

Students will learn how to read primary sources closely, and to think
critically not only about what the text means but also about how it means.

Perry Hodges, Law School