The Good, the Bad, and the Ironic: Two Views on Law and Literature

Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities Volume 8 | Issue 2 Article 9 January 1996 The Good, the Bad, and the Ironic: Two Views on Law and Literature Bruce L. Rockwood Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh Part of the History Commons, and the Law Commons Recommended Citation Bruce L. Rockwood, The Good, the Bad, and the Ironic: Two Views on Law and Literature, 8 Yale J.L. & Human. (1996). Available at: https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol8/iss2/9 This Article is brought to you for free and open access by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. It has been accepted for inclusion in Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities by an authorized editor of Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository. For more information, please contact . Rockwood: The Good, the Bad, and the Ironic The Good, the Bad, and the Ironic: Two Views on Law and Literature Daniel J. Kornstein, Kill All the Lawyers? Shakespeare's Legal Appeal. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Pp. xvii, 274. $24.95. Ian Ward, Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xi, 264. $49.95. Bruce L. Rockwood* The law and literature project1 continues to expand in two directions. First, some scholars pursue the detailed study of specific texts and authors for the light they shed on the nature of law and its impact on our lives. Second, some engage in the systematic introspection required for the application of critical theory-to both fiction about legal issues and to the interpretation of legal texts as a form of literature-in an attempt to make a place for the law and literature movement within, or as a continuation of, modern and postmodern intellectual history.' Daniel Kornstein's Kill All the Lawyers? reflects * Bruce L. Rockwood is Professor of Business Law at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, where he teaches law and literature and other subjects. He is editor of the forthcoming Law and LiteraturePerspectives (Peter Lang), and is an active participant in the annual Roundtable on Law and Semiotics, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary. He has also written articles on international law and banking law. My thanks to M.A.R. Habib and Susan Marshall Rockwood for their comments and advice on earlier drafts. In addition, I thank Merle Loper for his comments and for the opportunity to examine some of the arguments in this Paper in his Seminar on Due Process and Equal Protection at the University of Maine School of Law during my sabbatical there in the fall of 1995. 1. Law and literature is a project that is most easily defined as a process of reading and comparing literary and legal texts for the insights each provides into the other, and whose combined force illuminates our understanding of ourselves and our society. See Bruce L. Rockwood, Introduction: On Doing Law and Literature, in LAW AND LITERATURE PERSPECTIVES 19 (Bruce L. Rockwood ed., 1996). As James Boyd White has noted, "[Il]iterature and law are both about reason and emotion, politics and aesthetics ... " JAMES BOYD WHITE, Law and Literature: "No Manifesto," 39 MERCER L. REV. 739, 751 (1988). 2. For a nice discussion of the relationship of text and theory, see David Bevington, Reconstructing Shakespeare, U. CHI. MAG., Spring 1990, at 21. Published by Yale Law School Legal Scholarship Repository, 1996 1 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities, Vol. 8, Iss. 2 [1996], Art. 9 Yale Journal of Law & the Humanities [Vol. 8: 533 the first trend, and Ian Ward's collection of essays, Law and Literature, combines both approaches, seeking to frame its textual analysis within an overview of several schools of critical theory. Each approach has its strengths and weaknesses, and while each of these excellent new books contributes to the development of the field, each also shows the limitations of an analysis that puts too much emphasis on a single approach. The "good" in the title of this Review reflects their focus on classical and modern texts that demonstrate to lawyers and lay readers alike how well literature and literary theory can illuminate the place of law in society. What is arguably "bad" is Kornstein's inability to focus on a few major themes, leaving the reader overwhelmed by detail, and Ward's recurrent reliance on tightly summarized theoretical arguments of others, overburdening the reader anxious to get to the heart of the literary text and its implications for our understanding of law. The "ironic" can be seen in many of the characterizations of lawyers and the law in both books-starting with Kornstein's title and including Ward's detailed discussion of Johnathan Swift's view of the law-and in the narrative methods deployed in the texts they examine.3 Irony is also apparent in Ward's clearly expressed doubts about the point of all the theory he has so thoroughly explicated.4 Daniel Kornstein, a practicing attorney and president of the Law and Humanities Institute, has written widely over the past decade on Shakespeare's treatment of law, and his lessons for contemporary attorneys, in articles published in the New York Law Journal and numerous law reviews. His book reflects many years of reflection on his chosen subject, incorporated now into a treatment of "those [plays] that seemed most useful and fertile for the theme of Shakespeare and the law."5 While "only an amateur" when it comes to Shakespeare, he makes a convincing case that "[clulture has been delegated too much to the experts": Those who love Shakespeare, particularly attorneys who combine their legal training and experience with close reading of Shakespeare, independent study of scholarship in the field, and their own experience of his plays, can "draw new connections, and open new perspectives, not only on the plays, but also on notions of law."6 By implication-and by example -Kornstein does just that, and in a way that encourages a similar response in his audience. He addresses a reading public interested in 3. IAN WARD, LAW AND LrMRATURE: PossmILmES AND PERSPECrIVES 112-16 (1995). See, e.g., infra text accompanying notes 105-11 (discussing Ward's treatment of Atwood). 4. See, e.g., WARD, supra note 3, at 56. After all is said and done, perhaps Ward felt he had to discuss the theory so that no one else need do it again! 5. DANIEL J. KORNSTEIN, KILL ALL THE LAWYERS? SHAKESPEARE'S LEGAL APPEAL at xvii (1994). 6. Id. at xiv. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlh/vol8/iss2/9 2 Rockwood: The Good, the Bad, and the Ironic 1996] Rockwood the law and-he hopes-inclined to accept that his approach will aid its understanding of both the law and Shakespeare's plays and their implications for our times. In contrast, Ian Ward, senior lecturer in the Centre for Legal Studies at the University of Sussex in England, is an established scholar with long experience in teaching and writing for an academic audience. He shares Kornstein's enthusiasm for his (...truncated)