1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910785149603321

Autore

Binder Guyora

Titolo

Literary Criticisms of Law / / Robert Weisberg, Guyora Binder

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Princeton, NJ : , : Princeton University Press, , [2000]

©2000

ISBN

1-282-76703-8

9786612767036

1-4008-2363-3

Edizione

[Course Book]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (557 p.)

Disciplina

340

Soggetti

Culture and law

Law -- Interpretation and construction

Law and literature

Literature - History and criticism

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

Description based upon print version of record.

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- CONTENTS -- PREFACE -- INTRODUCTION: Law as Literature -- CHAPTER ONE. Interpretive Crises in American Legal Thought -- CHAPTER TWO. Hermeneutic Criticism of Law -- CHAPTER THREE. Narrative Criticism of Law -- CHAPTER FOUR. Rhetorical Criticism of Law -- CHAPTER FIVE. Deconstructive Criticism of Law -- CHAPTER SIX .Cultural Criticism of Law -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

In this book, the first to offer a comprehensive examination of the emerging study of law as literature, Guyora Binder and Robert Weisberg show that law is not only a scheme of social order, but also a process of creating meaning, and a crucial dimension of modern culture. They present lawyers as literary innovators, who creatively interpret legal authority, narrate disputed facts and hypothetical fictions, represent persons before the law, move audiences with artful rhetoric, and invent new legal forms and concepts. Binder and Weisberg explain the literary theories and methods increasingly applied to law, and they introduce and synthesize the work of over a hundred authors in the fields of law, literature, philosophy, and cultural studies. Drawing on these disparate bodies of scholarship, Binder and Weisberg analyze law as



interpretation, narration, rhetoric, language, and culture, placing each of these approaches within the history of literary and legal thought. They sort the styles of analysis most likely to sharpen critical understanding from those that risk self-indulgent sentimentalism or sterile skepticism, and they endorse a broadly synthetic cultural criticism that views law as an arena for composing and contesting identity, status, and character. Such a cultural criticism would evaluate law not simply as a device for realizing rights and interests but also as the framework for a vibrant cultural life.