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
Telling Stories Out of School: An Essay on Legal Narratives
Once upon a time, the law and literature movement taught us that stories have much to say to lawyers, and Robert Cover taught us that law is itself a story. Instead of living happily ever after with that knowledge, some feminists and critical race theorists have taken the next logical step: telling stories, often about personal experiences, on the pages of the law reviews. By 1989, legal storytelling had risen to such prominence that it warranted a symposium in a major law review.2 Thus far, however, little or no systematic appraisal of this movement has been offered.3 We agree with the storytellers that taking the movement seriously requires engaging its ideas,4 and