""Literary Criticisms of Law" shows what can happen when two shrewd law professors take the time and have the theoretical sophistication to master the wide variety of today's state-of-the-art literary criticism. This absorbing book both maps efforts in the last two decades to understand law as a kind of literature and makes a compelling case for the most productive way to do so. Avoiding the twin traps of radical skepticism and moralizing sentimentality that have snared even some of the best work in the field, Binder and Weisberg demonstrate how law shapes culture and vice versa."--Brook Thomas, author of "Cross-Examinations of Law And Literature, The New Historicism and Other Old-Fashioned Topics," and "American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract"

"No other work attempts what this one does, a synthetic account of all the genres within the field of law and literature. As a synthesis, this book is first-rate. It not only summarizes but also puts to work a strong, acerbic critical intelligence, clarifying what the authors think is valuable in some approaches and deficient in others. The ability to provoke argument is one of the qualities that makes "Literary Criticisms of Law" consistently interesting. It is more theoretically sophisticated, historically informed, and deeply reflective than any similar work in its field."--Robert W. Gordon, Yale Law School

"A very impressive book. Each chapter contains numerous original, sweeping, and, for the most part, convincing arguments about large swaths of current legal intellectual history. As the first and only attempt so far to synthesize and assess this interdisciplinary field, the book will be extremely useful to manyscholars in the humanities and social sciences."--Robin West, Georgetown University Law Center

It has long been recognized that court trials in the common law system, both criminal and civil, operate around pairs of competing narratives told by opposing advocates. In recent years, however, it has increasingly been argued that narrative flows in many directions and through every form of legal theory and practice. Interest in the part played by metaphor in the law, including metaphors for the law, and for many standard concepts in legal practice, has also been strong, though research under the metaphor banner has been much more fragmentary. In this book, for the first time, a distinguished group of legal scholars, collaborating with specialists from cognitive theory, journalism, rhetoric, social psychology, criminology, and legal activism, explore how narrative and metaphor are both vital to the legal process. Together, they examine topics including concepts of law, legal persuasion, human rights law, gender in the law, innovations in legal thinking, legal activism, creative work around the law, and public debate around crime and punishment.

It has long been recognized that court trials in the common law system, both criminal and civil, operate around pairs of competing narratives told by opposing advocates. In recent years, however, it has increasingly been argued that narrative flows in many directions and through every form of legal theory and practice. Interest in the part played by metaphor in the law, including metaphors for the law, and for many standard concepts in legal practice, has also been strong, though research under the metaphor banner has been much more fragmentary. In this book, for the first time, a distinguished group of legal scholars, collaborating with specialists from cognitive theory, journalism, rhetoric, social psychology, criminology, and legal activism, explore how narrative and metaphor are both vital to the legal process. Together, they examine topics including concepts of law, legal persuasion, human rights law, gender in the law, innovations in legal thinking, legal activism, creative work around the law, and public debate around crime and punishment.