Legal themes and figures abound in American novels, and it’s not hard to understand the appeal that law holds for American novelists and their readers. Novels are propelled by various personal and societal conflicts, and the law is all about conflict. Novels prominently feature change, sometimes on a large scale but more often on the level of the main characters’ personal fortunes. And change is central to the law, which attempts to balance the need for the innovation required by new facts and novel controversies with the need for predictability and continuity that comes from following precedent and adhering to “bright line” rules. In addition, conflict and change form the warp and woof of the history furnishing the source material for most American fiction.

This class will survey and analyze the major themes and figures of the American law novel. We will take up novels involving commercial law, family law, constitutional law, as well as criminal law. In addition to considering issues of legal procedure, detection, and punishment, we will discuss more general jurisprudential questions of order, authority, conflict, change, and justice.

There will be a lot of reading in this class. We will begin with nineteenth-century representations of law, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter, Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, and William Dean Howells’s A Modern Instance. We will then proceed to survey twentieth-century legal fictions, such as Richard Wright’s Native Son, William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust, Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, and Bernard Malamud’s The Fixer, and Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities.

This course will satisfy the following English major/minor requirement: American Literature

Course Requirements:

There will be weekly reading quizzes, a midterm and final, as well as two 5-page papers.