Law and Literature: a Dilettante’s Dream?

William Twining, Emeritus Quain Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, will deliver the inaugural lecture in a new programme for the Foundation for Law, Justice and Society, on Law, Film, and Literature.

In the lecture, he will contend that the fields of ‘law’ and ‘literature’ are much too broad and amorphous to encompass one or even a few coherent sets of relations. If ‘interpretation’ of written texts is the most stable meeting point between legal and literary theory, what has this to do with socio-legal studies? Is not the main focus of this area on actual social relations and institutions in ‘the real world’?

Rejecting a reductionist approach, Professor Twining will reveal how encounters with literary theory have influenced his own thinking as a jurist, in relation to standpoint and narrative. In the course of the lecture, he will also make the case for including Italo Calvino in the mainstream of canonical jurisprudence.