Narayan : Being a lawyer as well as a devotee of legal fiction, I found your book a most comprehensive & all-encompassing bibliography on law & literature. Ms. Corcos, my first question, what made you undertake this task of making such a bibliography?
Christine : I have always loved to read books & watch films that had legal themes so I thought I would make myself a bibliography of all the secondary sources that would help in studying this material. I thought (naively) that the bibliography wouldn't be very long & that it wouldn't take me much time to complete. I quickly discovered that I was wrong, since while the study of law & literature by legal scholars is comparatively new, it has long been a subject of interest to scholars studying literature & the other arts.
Narayan : The content of the book is aplenty. What was your criterion in listing the works--or rather what were the elements that you considered in identifying a work to be in the realm of law & literature? Again, what is your perception of the concept ‘law & literature' actually is?
Christine : There were a number of reasons that I decided to try to do something comprehensive. First, I found a number of shorter bibliographies that were focused on particular subjects: law in Dickens, for instance. But it seemed to me that it was important to do a comprehensive bibliography in order to show just how expansive & deep the study of law & literature is. Further, I thought that the study of law & the other humanities was of equal interest so I expanded the coverage to include some materials in the area of law & film, for example, or law & music. This coverage isn't nearly as extensive as the law & literature section because I came to it later. I probably should have changed the name of the book to “An International Guide to the Study of Law & the Humanities,” but I neglected to do so. I keep thinking that if I do an update or a revised Edition I will change the title. Of course I may never do an update. That may remain for someone else to do. That was another purpose in compiling the work: not only to encourage scholars to explore this material but to encourage bibliographers to expand &/or deepen the coverage & document this area of study & knowledge.
I also found that there was a lot of disagreement about whether law & literature is the study of the influence of law on literature, or literature on law, or something else. If you look at the Library of Congress subject headings in this area, for example, you will see that the Library of Congress uses “law & literature” & “law in literature.” The Library of Congress has specific meanings for these terms, obviously, but I think that whatever they are, they don't encompass all of the ideas that we are talking about when we talk about “law & literature” or “law & the humanities.” To some people law & literature also means copyright law or the droit morale de l'auteur; I think it can mean that but I didn't include that material. It would have been much too long--it's pretty unwieldy as it is. To me, law & literature means the interaction of the two disciplines in the area of the written word in fiction (similarly in law & music, law & art, etc.) where the intersection means something other than the law regulating the written word. There are other areas that I don't really touch on--law & archaeology for example, even though I think you could make the case that there is an intersection between the two. I have some cites to law & court buildings, but I know there must be more.
When I started looking for materials, therefore, I first limited myself to obvious indexing terms & subject headings, but I found that indexes & catalogers use additional, more specific terms, & that for indexing periodicals specifically there is no thesaurus of terms that many or all indexes use. So I needed to broaden my horizons a lot, & look for works indexed as “crime in literature,” or “rape in art” or “judges in music.” I also broadened my interpretation of “law” to mean things like the “law” in the “courts of law” of 12th & 13th century France, or notions of justice that fall outside the traditional legal definitions (including “poetic justice”). I used as many indexes as I could, covering all kinds of different media & using all kinds of keywords. I also looked for areas that had not been looked at to any great extent, like children's literature. There's a lot of law in fairy tales, but you need to know how to look for it.
Narayan : What led you to law & literature? How long did it take to amass this information? Was it a solo effort?
Christine : As I said I like reading mysteries & legal thrillers & watching legal dramas. I always liked studying literature in college & graduate school & of course I have a law degree. My mother was very influential in getting me interested in both areas. She wrote her doctoral dissertation (which she never presented because she left the University for high school teaching) on the images of law in Montesquieu's Persian Letters. I started the work in the mid 1980s & finally stopped collecting materials around 1998. However, the coverage doesn't necessarily reflect those years. I did all this alone, although from time to time I had research assistants who helped me verify the information. I tried to verify each citation. After I got started I began to write in the area. I've published several articles on law & film, & done lot of speaking around the country on the topic.
Narayan : Now, a somewhat mischief question--after the book was finished did you ever get a sort of an “Oops I missed that!” feeling. I ask this because you say in your Introduction that new chapters will be included in the future. Does that mean we can expect a third volume to The Guide?
Christine : I do think I left things out & it worries me--I think I should have included everything. I also cringe when I see typographical errors. But friends & colleagues have told me that it isn't possible to do that; one always has the feeling that one could have done better but it's important to do one's best at the time & then move on. I have tried to make The Guide as intellectually stimulating as possible for future users & to encourage further bibliography & research in the areas covered & intangential areas. That's the most I could do with this work & still get it finished. I would love to do an update or a third volume. I had originally thought of doing a loose-leaf work & issuing replacement pages but I think that in this day & age that would be prohibitively expensive. I do have a website devoted to law & the humanities that I try to update regularly. It is at:
http://faculty.law.lsu.edu/ccorcos/lawhum/lawhum.htm.
Narayan : Judging from the contents of The Guide, I believe that you are a legal fiction aficionado--any particular favorites among the current rage of lawyer-novelists & legal thriller authors. Again what do you think accounts for the popularity of legal thrillers in popular mystery today?
Christine : People really love to read about issues that touch their lives & they love literature & movies that express their ideas & opinions about law. They think they know a lot about law--after all they see it at the movies & on TV! They also like puzzles. Above all, though, people like to see justice done. They like the roller coaster ride that these books take them on, but they also like the “happy ending” when the perpetrator is caught & life can go on. Most people would not like a steady diet of books & films where the bad guy gets away with murder, unless the bad guy is someone they actually admire & she or he murders someone who deserves it!
Narayan : Again, over the past two decades or so, many a lawyer & law teacher, including most recently Yale Law Professor Stephen Carter have turned to legal thriller writing. Any plans to join the bandwagon? Can we expect a Corcos legal thriller in the near future?
Christine : I don't know about the near future since I have a number of projects I'm working on, including a book about psychic Helen Duncan & her trial for witchcraft in London in 1944. But I have played with the idea & I do plot mysteries in my head as a kind of therapy! My sister, who has a PhD in molecular biology, & I sketched out a mystery over the holidays, so you never know. We might actually write it.
Narayan : My final question, this one is for the researcher of law & popular culture--the top books you would recommend for the student of law & literature.
Christine : Oh, dear! I'm not sure whether you mean the top books to read or the top scholarly & reference books, or whether you mean the most influential books, or the ones with the most law/humanities content. It's a tough question. If you mean the top books as a kind of “primary source,” it's one of those horrible “desert island” questions [Editor: for an explanation of this phrase see If you could have only three books] that makes you re-evaluate your every word, like “who is your favorite composer?” My favorite composer changes regularly, but my second favorite composer is always Antonin Dvorak.
In answer, my choices will be hopelessly Euro-centered, I'm afraid, but here we go:
In the first category I would put Robert Traver's Anatomy of a Murder, Jerome Lawrence's & Robert E. Lee's Inherit the Wind, John Mortimer's Rumpole books, Georges Simenon's Maigret stories (choose one or two), the movie Ran directed by Tatsuya Nakadai, Robert Browning poems, particularly My Last Duchess, Shakespeare (Hamlet & The Merchant of Venice. Plays by the Greeks (Sophocles, Aristophanes. Other plays by Lope deVega & Racine or Corneille, & various holy books--The Bible, The Koran, The Talmud, the writings of Confucius, Lao-Tse, & bodies of myth & legend that tell us what the universal truths are about the human capacity for justice & judging, & when & whether it's desirable.
Agatha Christie has been incredibly influential, as has Erle Stanley Gardner. I'd probably recommend some books by them: Christie's The Murder of Roger Ackroyd which was such an innovation, Murder on the Orient Express (originally Murder on the Calais Coach), & any one of Gardner's Perry Mason mysteries. People don't know his D.A. mysteries which are darker than his Perry Mason books, & maybe more important literarily, but that is another topic altogether. A little farther afield, I could add George Orwell's 1984, some of Stanislaw Lem's works, like The Chain of Chance, which I love, & which makes us question our notions of evidence & causations. Kafka's The Trial is something that everybody cites; I'm not sure how many people read it, though! I could go on, but I think those give an interesting picture of various legal systems & the working out of legal problems: what is truth, what is justice, how do we dispense justice, what is evidence, what is the presumption of innocence?
In the second category, I would put Wayne C. Booth's Rhetoric of Irony & Rhetoric of Fiction. They teach one how to read a text with sensitivity & attention to detail. I learn something new every time I look at one of his books. There are a number of books that show one how to read a text for its law & literature (or law & humanities) context. There are a number of books that actually do law & literature that regularly get cited so it's good to be familiar with them: Richard Posner's Law & Literature: A Misunderstood Relation, Richard Weinberg's The Failure of the Word, for example. I also like a book by Robert Champing, What Will Have Happened that analyzes the narrative of mystery stories; it takes quite seriously the mystery genre as the greatest mystery writers practice it.
Finally, I have noticed that more & more, people are not learning to think critically. That's very important in life generally, & as applied to the study of law & literature it figures into the questioning that we must do in order to analyze texts. We should always be questioning the text, both for what it says & for what it does not say, & we can only do that if we can think coherently. We should, moreover, be careful not to be led astray by any new & attractive intellectual fashion that comes along. I could mention any number of philosophers who discuss logical thinking but a lot of their work is inaccessible even to the educated layperson. So I like books like Michael Shermer & Stephen J. Gould's Why People Believe Weird Things. While it isn't about law & lit or law & the humanities it illuminates for us how we examine & use evidence, the evidence of our senses in particular, & how & why we think what we think (if we think at all, that is). The situation reminds me of the dialogue between Matthew Harrison Brady & Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind: Brady: “I do not think about things that I do not think about!” Drummond: “Do you ever think about things that you do think about?”
Narayan : Thanks, Ms. Corcos for the illuminating interview. I am sure many an ardent devotee of legal fiction will be checking out all the books you have mentioned. Thanks, thanks a lot.
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