In the Tout Court of Shakespeare: Interdisciplinary Pedagogy in Law

(2004) 54 Journal of Legal Education 283

20 Pages Posted: 2 Aug 2012

See all articles by Desmond Manderson

Desmond Manderson

ANU College of Law; ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences; McGill University - Faculty of Law

Date Written: 2004

Abstract

A great civilization, said Robert Cover, is to be judged by the quality of its law no less than its literature or engineering or science. In particular he meant by law a nomos, which is to say a way of being in the law experienced by members of that community, a way in which their law is seen to be related to their literature, and their engineering, and their science, as part of a continually relevant cultural interaction. I have for a long time been looking for ways to properly integrate methods of interdisciplinary thinking into my writing and teaching. Typically one does this by using literary or other texts to shed light on the law. But this is a form of parallel play and not a real integration. My commitment to an interdisciplinary approach is far stronger than any mere comparativism. Law is a literature and, which is more, literature is law, in its form, its power, its interpretative strategies, its discursive effects. Now one might respond by insisting that law cannot be conjured out of nothingness: it requires a specific institutional form that authorizes and enforces it. But that is entirely to confuse cause and effect. The question of form is undoubtedly relevant to legal – as to any – meaning and rhetoric, but institutionalization within specific State-driven structures is not. The treatment of law as if its meaning and its legitimacy were somehow separate from the cultural forces that give birth to it and in relation to which it is understood, has led scholars to make of law a mere technic for dispute resolution, and a purely hermetic practice beholden to nothing but its own logic. The failure to appreciate that law’s value stems from its cultural integration has amounted to a systematic impoverishment of its capacities and of its relevance to the community as a whole. I have often wondered how best to dramatize some of these issues: to ask students to imagine what it might be like to experience the birth of law, and to invite them to be responsible for the emergence of interpretative and normative principles; to encourage them to explore the interpretative connections and differences between literature and law in a real setting; to provide a forum in which students and teachers can think carefully about how our normative beliefs find their way into and through objective legal texts, forming and yet being constrained by its meaning.

In particular, I have always thought that any sufficiently rich body of textual material could serve as the basis of a legal system, and would pose very similar questions as to how those texts become binding and meaningful under the day to day pressures of judicial reasoning. Moreover, I think there is a real advantage in approaching these complex questions indirectly, offering therefore to teach students about law (or droit or Recht) – its genesis and evolution, its structures of reasoning and rhetoric, and the relationship of facts to texts to norms – without ever making the mistake of reducing it to the content of any particular ‘law’ (or loi or Gesetz ) whatsoever. The current essay explores a pedagogical experiment in which English and Law students worked together to found a ‘court of Shakespeare’ as an ongoing practice of legal genesis, constitution, and interpretation.

Keywords: law, legal theory, law and literature, Shakespeare, legal pedagogy

Suggested Citation

Manderson, Desmond, In the Tout Court of Shakespeare: Interdisciplinary Pedagogy in Law (2004). (2004) 54 Journal of Legal Education 283, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1515388

Desmond Manderson (Contact Author)

ANU College of Law; ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences ( email )

Canberra, Australian Capital Territory 0200
Australia

HOME PAGE: http://https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/manderson-dra

McGill University - Faculty of Law ( email )

Canada

HOME PAGE: http://https://researchers.anu.edu.au/researchers/manderson-dra

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