SOURCE: Ward, Ian. “Law and Literature: A Continuing Debate.” In Law and Literature: Possibilities and Perspectives, pp. 3-27. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Ward summarizes the history and evolution of the scholarly debate regarding law and literature, noting key ideas and critics.

Students seek out good teaching to learn not the rules but the culture, for the rules are everywhere the same.¹

The purpose of this introductory chapter is essentially synoptic. Indeed there is a very tangible sense in which, after more than a decade of the renewed law and literature ‘debate’, it seems appropriate to a number of the debaters to look back and take stock.² This is not to suggest any running out of ideas or cooling in the heat of debate, but rather, as both Brook Thomas and Richard Posner have recently suggested, because law and literature is becoming increasingly ‘serious’.³ It...