Law and Literature: Storytelling

What constitutes powerful storytelling in literature and the law? How does literature make truth and justice claims? And what can we learn from literature about how to craft compelling stories on behalf of our clients? We’ll explore these questions and more through our investigation of literary and legal texts after a brief theoretical grounding in law and literature. Our literary texts will be eclectic, ranging from Sophocles and Chekhov to Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Ayad Akhtar, science fiction writer Octavia Butler, essayist George Orwell and disability memoirist Chloe Cooper Jones, as well as works by activist poets like Muriel Rukeyser and Layli Long Soldier. Our legal texts will include select amicus briefs, complaints, and opinions that share the themes of our literary texts, as well as primary materials from the University of Virginia archives about Black labor organizers at UVA during the Civil Rights era. Work products for this course will be several brief reflection papers responding directly to our texts and course unit inquiries.