【作者】波斯納
【內(nèi)容提要】
The field of law and literature is not new. Nineteenth-century English lawyers wrote about depictions of the legal system by Shakespeare, Dickens, and other famous writers.5 Wigmore thought lawyers should read the great writers to learn about human nature." Cardozo's paper "Law and Literature" analyzed the literary style of judicial opinions.7 But only since the publication in 1973 of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination" has a distinct, selfconscious field of law and literature emerged. Until then the field consisted of little more than reminders that law is a surprisingly frequent subject of literature and that judicial opinions, and to some extent other forms of legal writing, often have a literary character and quality. The frequency with which legal subject matter appears in literature is, I shall argue later, a largely adventitious circumstance. The literary character of judicial opinions, on the other hand, is an interesting and significant phenomenon, though regrettably a diminishing one, as more and more opinions are ghostwritten by newly graduated law students neither chosen for nor encouraged in literary flair.