Simon Stern’s ‘Law & Literature (As an
Approach to Criminal Law)’ is forthcoming in The Oxford Handbook of Criminal Law, Markus Dubber & Tatjana
Hörnle, eds. (Oxford UP 2014).
Abstract
'This book chapter discusses the use of literary
material as a means of studying criminal law. The chapter provides an overview
on various methods of combining legal and literary materials (law in
literature, literature in law, law as literature, legal aesthetics) and offers
two case studies (Susan Glaspell's "A Jury of Her Peers" and Robert
Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) to show how
literature can open up questions both about substantive criminal law doctrines
and also about the grounds on which those doctrines are applied. Along the way,
the discussion shows how various scholars of criminal law, such as Nicola Lacey
and Anne Coughlin, have raised questions that have also provoked the interest
of literary scholars such as Dorrit Cohn and Blakey Vermeule.
The chapter also serves as a bibliography for
scholars seeking further resources that examine criminal law through the lens
of literature. These resources include bibliographies of primary texts (such as
crime-based fiction, "dying confessions" circulated at executions,
and movies), secondary texts (discussing law and criminal behavior in relation
to fiction, drama, and poetry), and web-based resources (such as the Old Bailey
Sessions Papers Online). In that spirit, the chapter also discusses some
research that is often overlooked in discussions of criminal law and literature
– such as Todd Herzog’s research on Weimar-era true-crime narratives that were
created from actual case files; Jonathan Eburne’s research on crime in the work
of the French surrealists; Lorna Hutson’s research on civic plots of detection
in renaissance drama and their relation to the development of evidence law; and
Lisa Rodensky’s work on narrative modes in Victorian fiction and their relation
to the treatment of mens rea in contemporaneous legal thought.
The chapter closes with some brief reflections
on the potential for current work in cognitive literary studies to change the
way we think about literature's relation to law, and, in particular, the way we
impose narrative templates on the events we experience.'
Full text of the article is available here.
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