Law and Literature - from the new hermeneutics to deconstruction, from communitarist narrativism to the jurisprudence of principles

Recommended Prerequisites

Not specified.

Teaching Methods

Seminar-like discussion of the topics, with portions of the class devoted to presentations by the instructor and to hearing comments by the students on assigned readings. Class attendance will be taken into account for assessment purposes, but the main focus will be on hearing in class the results of a working paper written by the doctoral student and previously handed in to the instructor and the classmates. In it the student is expected to examine by himself the core contents of the seminar.

Learning Outcomes

The foremost goal is to examine as widely as possible the possibilities offered by the so-called Law and literaturemovementso as to elicit a fully autonomous critical reflection on Law in the contemporary world.

Work Placement(s)

No

Syllabus

1. Besides the linguistic turn a literary turn? A response to the challenges made by law and economics scholarship?

2. A few specifications-grids. 2.1. The law of literature / law in literature / law as literature counterpoint. 2.2. The literary jurisprudence / narrative jurisprudence / interpretative jurisprudence counterpoint (MINDA). 2.3. The humanist / hermeneutic/ narrative..... law-and-lits counterpoint (Jane BARON). 2.4. The intentio auctoris / intentio operis /  intentio lectoris counterpoint.

3. Law as literature

3.1 New Hermeneutics and Deconstruction as philosophical (and methodic) perspectives dominated by intentio operis.

3.2. The legal theory of interpretation and the subjectivism/objectivism, dogmatic/teleological interpretation counterpoints. The specificity of North-American interpretive theory (intentionalism, textualism, purposivism). Cursory reference to the Posner/Dworkin counterpoint.

3.3. «How Law is like literature»: the specificity of Dworkin’s thought.

3.4. The problem of intentio lectoris. Cursory reference to the aesthetics of reception and reader-response critique. A counterpoint between Jauss and Fish. The proposals by Boyd White and Balkin/Levinson: which intentio lectoris?

4. The challenges of Poetic Justice.

5. Overarching critical reflection.

Assessment Methods

Assessment
Class attendance will be taken into account for assessment purposes: 100.0%

Bibliography

Linhares, J. M. A. «Imaginação literária e “justiça poética”. Um discurso da “área aberta”?», Boletim da Faculdade de Direito, vol. LXXXV (2009), Coimbra, pp. 111-149.

Id., Law in/as Literature as an Alternative Humanistic Discourse: the Unavoidable Resistance to Legal Scientific Pragmatism or The Fertile Promise of a Communitas Without Law?», in M. Paola MITTICA (ed.), Law and Literature, publicado on line em Setembro de 2010, pp. 22-42, disponível em http://www.lawandliterature.org/ index.php?channel=PAPERS-ESSAYS .

Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice. The Literary Imagination and Public Life, Boston, Beacon Press Books, 1995.