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 Problem of Disagreement in Legal Ethics Theory
Legal ethics theories give competing and exclusive accounts of the ethical foundations of the lawyer’s role. They disagree about the relationship between morality and law, about the content of the lawyer’s central ethical duties and about how specific ethical problems should be resolved. Each theoretical account asserts that the others are mistaken in some fundamental way. Yet all legal ethics theories are theories of action; legal ethics theorists do not seek merely to enlighten, they also seek to influence how lawyers and the legal profession respond to ethical issues. This creates a problem of disagreement: the problem created by the divergent but exclusive claims made by different ethical theories at the point when those theories are to be translated into action. This paper considers how, given the problem of disagreement, legal ethics theories can have any impact on individual ethical decision-making or public policy. Specifically, it considers how theories can have any impact given a) that they fundamentally disagree; and b) what experimental psychology tells us about how people make ethical decisions in fact, and the nature of lawyer regulation.