Law and Literature: Revised and Enlarged Edition

Judge Posner's insights are always illuminating. He is throoughly mainstream one minute and totally out of teh box the next. This book will give the conventional English lit major whiplash. Icons toppled followed by cliches rejuvenated. They shouldn't worry. Posner has been making lawyers and law professors reexamine all assumptions for nearly 40 years. From some of these reveiws it seems the English Lit types are a little more protective of turf than the lawyers have been.

People who have an appetite for words and the law will enjoy and profit from "Law and Literature." The prolific Richard Posner has updated his intellectually stimulating first edition to present once again an important study of how the fields of literature and law intersect and inform each other. As you read it, have a dictionary handy: in no other book of its size are you likely to encounter such words as antimonies, ressentiment, simulacra, sitzfleisch, bildungsroman, fictive, and agonistic. From time to time I thought he was just showing off his vocabulary, but I came to believe that that's the way he really thinks. It's a challenge, but it's worth it.

Judge Posner is one of the more wondrous polymaths of his generation. Law and Literature, although not the greater of his achievements, is a thoughtful opus, full of illuminating insights. I read his book 6 or 7 years ago but I remember how impressed I was by the sharpness of his analysis of the legal implications of Kafka's Trial and Melville's Billy Budd. I have been roused to giving my opinion because all the other commentators are so uniformly negative about the book. Clearly, either they are missing something, or I am wide off the mark. I propose it's the former, and recommend "Law and Literature" to anyone who wants to know how one of the heights of contemporary legal thought tackles many of the issues that have occupied anyone who knows the law and enjoys literature. The fact that Posner doesn't indulge in deconstructionist twaddle is no reason to abstain.

I must admit a bias for Posner because much of his thinking about law and economics has influenced my thoughts and opinions. Needless to say it was a pleasant surprise to find this book that handles the law-literature relationship as well as the relationship between law and economics. There is an eclectic selection of books and poems reviewed, and the organization is impeccable. The most important thing that I can say about this book is that it introduced and encouraged me to read other fields of literature that I had ignorantly dismissed in the past as being irrelevant.