Law and Literature: Its Possibilities and Limitations [法律与文学：可能性及其限度]
Law and Literature is an academic movement originated from American law schools in 1970s, and developed into a school or a field of legal studies. Yet there were also a lot suspicions and criticisms that accompanied its development. Law and Literature is an intellectually constructed union of some different disciplines’ studies, without any universal methodology. As both object and approach of Law and Literature studies, literature has two implications. In the narrow sense of the word, literature and law are two kinds of comparative tools of social control. The long-standing tensions between them restrict their cooperation. In the narrow sense of the word, literature contains law: Legal works are parts of the ubiquitous texts. The normally logical attribution and empirically social attribution of Law and Literature studies have specified its fate of neither prosperity nor perishment. The Law and Literature movement in America provides various possibilities and inspirations for the innovation of Chinese legal studies.
The City and the Poet
t Professor of Law, Yale Law School. I thank Ina Bort, Peter Brooks, Robert Burt, Gene Coakley, Ariela Dubler, Robert Ferguson, Oren Izenberg, Carol Rose, Catherine Sharkey, and participants in workshops at Columbia University and Tel Aviv University. Jessica BulmanPozen, Aaron Crowell, Matthew Fagin, Cary Franklin, Michael Gottlieb, and Allegra di Bonaventura Hogan provided excellent research assistance. 1835
The Role of Democratic Politics in Transforming Moral Convictions into Law
Professor Michael Perry's new book, Morality, Politics, and Law, is an ambitious attempt to address the extent to which moral and religious beliefs in a pluralistic society, such as ours, can legitimately influence law. He departs from the common opinion in legal circles that moral beliefs are a matter of taste or "values," and defends an older conception that it is possible to attain moral "knowledge." ' He also departs from the "liberal political-philosophical project," 2 which claims that it is possible (and desirable) for governments to steer a neutral course between competing moral understandings of the good. This, he suggests, is an illusion, and a disguise for the imposition of a particular moral structure without opportunity for open deliberation and reflection. Professor Perry brings some refreshing common sense to these riddles of moral philosophy. His "naturalist" approach has obvious roots in Aristotle-not a bad place to begin thinking about ethics. His dismissal of