Description
Literary Criticisms of Law shows what can happen when two shrewd law professors take the time and have the theoretical sophistication to master the wide variety of today's state-of-the-art literary criticism. This absorbing book both maps efforts in the last two decades to understand law as a kind of literature and makes a compelling case for the most productive way to do so. Avoiding the twin traps of radical skepticism and moralizing sentimentality that have snared even some of the best work in the field, Binder and Weisberg demonstrate how law shapes culture and vice versa. -- Brook Thomas, author of "Cross-Examinations of Law And Literature, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics," and "American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract" No other work attempts what this one does, a synthetic account of all the genres within the field of law and literature. As a synthesis, this book is first-rate. It not only summarizes but also puts to work a strong, acerbic critical intelligence, clarifying what the authors think is valuable in some approaches and deficient in others. The ability to provoke argument is one of the qualities that makes Literary Criticisms of Law consistently interesting. It is more theoretically sophisticated, historically informed, and deeply reflective than any similar work in its field. -- Robert W. Gordon, Yale Law School A very impressive book. Each chapter contains numerous original, sweeping, and, for the most part, convincing arguments about large swaths of current legal intellectual history. As the first and only attempt so far to synthesize and assess this interdisciplinary field, the book will be extremely useful to many scholars in the humanities and social sciences. -- Robin West, Georgetown University Law Center
About the Author
Guyora Binder, Professor of Law at the State University of New York at Buffalo, is the author of Treaty Conflict and Political Contradiction and a coauthor of Criminal Law. Robert Weisberg, Edwin E. Huddleson, Jr., Professor of Law at Stanford University, is a coauthor of Criminal Law.
Reviews
Immensely learned, thorough, and sane. -- Anthony Julius The Times Literary Supplement
Book Information
ISBN 9780691007243
Author Guyora Binder
Format Paperback
Page Count 440
Imprint Princeton University Press
Publisher Princeton University Press
Weight(grams) 765g