Home > West's Encyclopedia of American Law > Law and Literature

An interdisciplinary study that examines the relationship between the fields of law and literature, with each field borrowing insights and methods of analysis from the other.

Taught as a comparative studies course in many academic settings, the law and literature curriculum was developed by members of academia and the legal profession who hoped to make law a more humanistic enterprise.

Law and literature is now a burgeoning field of comparative learning. During the 1990s entire scholarly journals were dedicated to the subject. From the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s, state and national bar associations sponsored many theatrical re-creations of legal questions presented in classic works of literature, including those written by William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens.

The Greek philosopher Plato recognized a relationship between law and literature more than two thousand years ago, writing, "A society's law book should, in...