7/1/2023 0 Comments Politics and poetics aristotleThere is also a ‘literature’ on law and the ‘literature’ of law itself. Just think of the great trial towards the end of The Brothers Karamazov, or the Count’s entreaties to Haydée about slavery’s territorial legality and thus her freedom in Paris in The Count of Monte Cristo, or the Merchant of Venice’s famous determination concerning ‘a pound of flesh’. Literature is full of law and legal cases. Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a case in point, regarding the moral wrongness of slavery, which was at the time perfectly legal. Our collective understandings of these moral virtues (and indeed the vices too) have been mediated by way of literature. They are more often borrowed into law from culture, history, or religion. Justice, goodness, fairness, guilt and other moral values do not usually get defined within the law itself. But it is also connects to the need for law to be humane, to serve both the common and individual good, insofar as possible. Literature as a bona fide good in law school is connected to all sorts of competencies necessary for practising law (see: ‘ Not writing nothing no more’: remedial instruction necessary for law BA). Readers of this blog have heard me harp on about the importance of Greek tragedy for the law curriculum (See: What have the Greeks ever done for us?).
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