Essay by Emily Fowler Hartigan
This essay turns in several directions. One is toward Richard Weisberg, whose most recent book on law and literature, Poethics: And Other Strategies of Law and Literature was difficult and confounding yet informative for me. One is toward James Boyd White, the founding figure in law and literature as an academic field, who has attracted considerable critical hostility in the past few years—to which Weisberg adds with zest. Thus another turn is toward mediation, as the ostensibly shared realm of Weisberg and White is of signal value to the study of law. Yet a further turn is away—not from White, whom I know and respect, nor Weisberg, whom I have never met—but from a combative, hierarchic tone of discourse surrounding the foundational patriarchal space of law and literature. Weisberg and even White make such a grating discourse likely, I venture, by their near-total exclusion of women from their texts. Rather than retreating solely to the “other” version of the field, which Weisberg takes on though ineffectively—the one inhabited by Robin West, Judith Resnik, Marie Ashe, Drucilla Cornell and a score of wonderful feminist writers—I want to speak for a new timbre of conversation, a new openness, even a new dance. I take name for such a movement as one “from righteousness to beauty,” because of the inherent draw of the goodness of law, its irresistible poetry, its manifest desirability. Under such a banner, I cannot begin by criticism but neither can I avoid it.
About the Author
Emily Fowler Hartigan. Adjunct Professor, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Resident, Pendle Hill Quaker Center for Study and Contemplation.
Citation
67 Tul. L. Rev. 455 (1992)