With absolute, overwhelming conviction, he didn’t believe it.
- Philip K. Dick, Minority Report

I’m enthralled with the paradox in that sentence, but I’m not sure why. I read it in one of the texts for a Law and Literature mini-course I took last year. I remember at the time I thought the sentence reflected the theme of the story quite powerfully; now I don’t remember the theme of the story anymore and I don’t really care.

I took the course because I figured it would provide me with some familiar ground in an unfamiliar environment, but it was an incredibly disappointing class. The focus was on the themes of law, justice, and criminality within science fiction. Not really my cup of tea, but I’ll read anything with a narrative. The class discussions, however, were mind-numbing. They went from quick plot summaries of the short stories to the question, how does this theme relate to what we already know about law in the world? From there, no-one ever returned to the stories themselves, except to refer to the actions of the characters in a decontextualized way, as though the experience of a character in a short story and one’s own experiences are discursively equivalent.

I guess I shouldn’t criticize too much; there’s no reason why a class of law students should conform to the expectations of a literature class. But it seemed that the course was indicative of the practice of the burgeoning “law and literature” movement. Apparently some legal academics are starting to recognize the relevance of narrative within the law. How facts, evidence, issues are framed by narrative, and how narratives about law (like Dickens’ Bleak House, which seems to be the main object of study) can offer lawyers a way to examine the legal system and its flaws. Fair enough, but I don’t think it goes far enough. I think a law and literature movement should look at not only novelists, but also poets and theorists: writers who recognize the complexity and inadequacy of language; who can shift the question from what does this mean to how can this mean?