SOURCE: Crane, Gregg D. “The Path of Law and Literature.” American Literary History 9, no. 4 (winter 1997): 758-75.

In the following essay, Crane discusses the extent to which literature and law interact and are capable of influencing each other and evaluates three recent studies of that subject.

In the Library of Congress's small collection of Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's papers, I recently happened upon the fragmentary beginnings of an essay on slavery and antebellum sectional hostility. Apparently written on the eve of the Civil War, the anonymous author laments the election of Abraham Lincoln and condemns “free state aggression” upon the nation's proslavery Constitution. The essayist attributes the constitutional crisis to the North's dissemination of “political hate” in its schoolrooms, pulpits, and “a novel of a character well calculated to raise the morbid thought of fanatics, which portrayed in pictures of exaggeration the evils of slavery” (“Fragment” 3).

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