Courses

Legal rules, and policy arguments regarding how they ought to be designed, often rely on social science knowledge or beliefs. For example, the proper design of both intellectual property rights and tax rules might depend on how particular choices would affect both economic output and the degree of inequality in the society. It might also further depend on how we believe those broader outcomes would affect people’s wellbeing. In legal discussions of the social science inputs to rule design, economic paradigms and analysis often receive predominant attention. However, there have been increasing calls for greater use of both the “soft” social sciences (such as sociology), and the humanities. This proposed shift in emphasis has included suggestions that literary works might offer a tool for better understanding sociological phenomena, or the moral considerations, that are relevant to law and policy. This emerging field, which one might call “Law, Literature, and Social Policy,” differs somewhat from traditional “Law and Literature,” although there is also significant overlap. The latter typically addresses such questions as how particular literary texts portray legal institutions, what the use of literary imagination might bring to legal analysis, and how storytelling might function in each realm. This seminar will focus less on such questions than on how literary and other creative works might help one to derive sociological insights that are relevant to public policy. Both approaches, however, involve taking an interest in the moral issues that literary texts help to raise. In this class, the topics of especial interest will include class, race, gender, capitalism, immigration, and the set of ideas commonly called the “American Dream.” We will read literary works that date from the early nineteenth through the early twenty-first century. We also will view (but not together in class) a famous American film that many of you may already have seen.