SOURCE: McCarthy, Finbarr. Review of Poetic Justice, by Martha Nussbaum. College Literature 25, no. 1 (winter 1998): 290-96.

In the following review of Poetic Justice, McCarthy evaluates Nussbaum's arguments regarding the role of compassion in legal decisions made by judges.

To learn how to regard others as fully human, to identify sympathetically with others the better to promote a vision of social justice as complex and democratic, legal thinkers, particularly judges, must, argues Martha Nussbaum in Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life, immerse themselves in literature. Particularly by reading such realist novels as Hard Times and Native Son, and perhaps by watching movies, and by then comparing their responses, the judiciary can develop, insists Nussbaum, the truly sophisticated ethical stance that judging other people demands. More than other narrative genres, novels, Nussbaum believes, enable such a stance. Their form and style compel readers to evaluate, against certain very general...