Is there literature in the law?

For almost a century, the symbiotic relationship between law and literature has been the object of a silent academic struggle, not without heated controversies among doctrinants.

The most significant current is, without a doubt, that of “ Law in Literature ” , a sector led by Benjamin Cardozo, a former magistrate of the United States Supreme Court, which carefully analyzes the introduction of legal elements in the body of literary texts and considers novels valuable material through which law students could learn about the nature of the human condition and how it matters in applying the Law. Franz Kafka’s Process , To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee or the The Stranger by Albert Camus are, among others, reference titles and great exponents of this line.

We invite you to read “Armero will disappear when the last witness disappears”: Hernán Darío Nova

Even so, for our purposes, the most interesting school of thought is “ Law as Literature ” , a branch of the previous one that has been promoted by James Boyd White, a prestigious professor at the University of Michigan, who has dedicated his life to the study of the language used by the Law and its connection with literature. For him, a lawyer and a literary critic are, in essence, the same thing, since they abandon the role of passive reader and embark on a more proactive one derived from their task of judging and interpreting the text they are reading. Professor Boyd’s position leaves us with several fascinating questions: do the Constitution and legislative codes have any literary value? Is Congress a great body of writers that shapes the reality of its world through articles and paragraphs? Or, even, could a magistrate with his jurisprudence or a professor of Law with his doctrinal production get to win the Nobel Prize for Literature?

We suggest you read History of Literature: “El lazarillo de Tormes”

Regarding this last question, and as bizarre as it may seem, I have no doubt that such a scenario could come to pass. The Swedish Academy’s commitment to highlighting eccentric literary genres, which was consolidated with the awarding of the award to the speeches of Winston Churchill (1953) or the songs of Bob Dylan (2016), opens a gap of opportunity through which they could sneak in, why not ?, authors of legal texts. All of us who have plunged into the depths of the Law know that many judgments or academic articles have achieved immortality not only because of their legal significance, but also because of the art with which they have been written.

Follow the news of El Espectador on Google News

Paradoxically, my main candidate to win this surely controversial distinction would be Judge Richard Posner, a brand-new retired professor at the University of Chicago and a staunch opponent of Cardozo and Boyd’s theses in their book Law and Literature . Always reluctant to consider the Law as something other than a technical resource, his potential appointment would fulfill a double function: that of profound irony for his beliefs and that of an act of poetic justice for his exquisite and prolific philosophical and jurisprudential bibliography.

It may interest you: The Colombian film “Memoria”, in the official selection of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival