Subjects:

General Interest

This edition continues to emphasize the essential social functions of legal and literary texts, but it also explores areas of mutual illumination and expands its range. It includes topics such as popular fiction about law, literary education for lawyers, the legal narrative, and judicial biography.;Literary works from Sophocles, Shakespeare, Dostoevsky, Melville, Kafka, and Camus to contemporary fiction by William Gadis, Tom Wolfe, and John Grisham come under Posner's scrutiny, as do recent attempts to apply the techniques of literary analysis to statutes, judicial opinions, and the Constitution. Posner discusses the increasing efforts of legal scholars to enrich their scholarship by borrowing the methods and insights of literature - even by insisting that legal education is incomplete without the ethical insights afforded by an immersion in literature.