Course Description
The course Law and Culture aims to investigate law's place in culture and culture's place in law. This focus proceeds from the realization that law does not function in a vacuum but exerts a powerful influence on all manner of cultural practices and productions, even as its own operation is influenced in turn by various forms of culture. Given this increasing porosity and inter-permeability of law and different forms of culture, the focus of this course is on the mutual influence of law and other discursive practices, such as literature, documentaries, music and film. In studying a number of prominent legal cases such as Brown v. Board of Education, Roe v. Wade (then and now) and the Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell cases, we will explore the following questions:
How is law used in literature, film and true crime documentaries as a source of structure, plot, characters, metaphor, and theme? How are law, lawyers, and legal institutions portrayed in literature, film and documentaries?
How do narrative constructions and strategies animate legal processes? How much of law itself is a series of narratives, of stories and of portrayals? What does it mean to write a text (including reports, emails, and interviews) in law? How does the meaning of law and the meaning of cultural imaginaries shift in literature, documentaries and film?
What are the mechanisms by which popular representations and cultural practices find their way into legal processes and decisions? How does law in turn bleed into and influence cultural processes? Does law act as a buffer against societal assumptions about, and constructions of, gender, age, ability, sexuality and ethnicity, or does it re-enforce and re-inscribe existing social norms?
How do law, literature and popular or medial representations describe the human condition—i.e. emotions, moral failures and triumphs and changing values over time—differently? How do these representations blend into each other?
- Teacher: Caroline Wiedmer