Law and Literature Seminar

This seminar critically explores some of the broader themes of legal education via the prism of literature. Through the works of such writers as Kurt Vonnegut, Paul Auster, Jorge Luis Borges, Kate Chopin, Donald Barthelme, Susan Glaspell, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Tim O'Brien, Philip K. Dick, Mark Twain, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor, and Thomas Pynchon, the course uses the short story format as a vehicle to analyze the discursive subtexts of our jurisprudence. Specific units of the class focus on our notions of equality, the law's ability to respond to technological change, law and morality, the construction of guilt and innocence, fact-finding and investigation, insanity and reason, evidence, and memory, and the law of the family.