AALS Section On Law and the Humanities Focuses on "Reasoning From Literature" at 2010 Conference

From Jessica Silbey, news of this year's AALS Section on Law and the Humanities
2010 AALS Conference, New Orleans

Reasoning from Literature

The “literary turn” in legal studies manifests in many ways in our legal discipline and practice. Be it with the birth of the study of law and literature in the 1980s, the growing attention to narrative theory and storytelling in the law in the 1990s, or the “cultural turn” in legal studies in the 21st century (as some scholars have called the cultural analysis of law), reasoning from literature seems commonplace. And yet it feels still marginalized in legal studies, as not “really law,” and lacking the core persuasive power that legal argumentation and doctrinal analysis do. This panel has been put together to wrestle with what it means to “reason from literature” and to contest the boundaries between legal reasoning and literary logic. Proceedings to be published in the Yale Journal of Law and Humanities, Winter 2010.


Program Chair: Jessica Silbey, Suffolk University Law School
Section Chair: David Ritchie, Mercer
Chair Elect: Angela Onwuachi-Willig, Iowa


Jessica Silbey
Associate Professor of Law
Suffolk University Law School
Boston, MA 02108
617-305-6270
jsilbey@suffolk.edu
http://www.law.suffolk.edu/faculty/directories/faculty.cfm?InstructorID=819