Law and the Humanities: An Introduction

Law and the Humanities: An Introduction brings together a distinguished group of scholars from law schools and an array of the disciplines in the humanities. Contributors come from the United States and abroad in recognition of the global reach of this field. This book is, at one and the same time, a stock taking both of different national traditions and of the various modes and subjects of law and humanities scholarship. It is also an effort to chart future directions for the field. By reviewing and analyzing existing scholarship and providing thematic content and distinctive arguments, it offers to its readers both a resource and a provocation. Thus, Law and the Humanities marks the maturation of this “law and” enterprise and will spur its further development.

Austin Sarat is William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence Political Science at Amherst College. He is author or editor of more than sixty books, including Mercy on Trial: What It Means to Stop an Execution; When the State Kills: Capital Punishment and the American Condition; Something to Believe In: Politics, Professionalism, and Cause Lawyers (with Stuart Scheingold); and The Blackwell Companion to Law and Society, among many others. Sarat is editor of the journal Law, Culture and the Humanities and of Studies in Law, Politics and Society. In 1997, Sarat received the Harry Kalven Award given by the Law and Society Association for distinguished research on law and society. In 2004, he received the 2004 Reginald Heber Smith Award, given biennially to honor the best scholarship on the subject of equal access to justice. It was given in recognition of his work on cause lawyering and the three books he has produced on the subject. In 2006, the Association for the Study of Law Culture and the Humanities awarded him the James Boyd White Prize for distinguished scholarly achievement in recognition of his 'innovative and outstanding' work in the humanistic study of law. In 2009 he received the Stan Wheeler Award from the Law & Society Association for distinguished teaching and mentoring.

Matthew Anderson is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of English and Language Studies at the University of New England. His teaching and scholarship combine an interest in law and in literature, particularly the ways in which issues of trauma and justice are registered in legal and literary texts. In 2005, he edited a special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, 'Towards a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities.' In 2009, he and Cathrine O. Frank received a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (USA) to direct a summer institute for college and university faculty on 'The Rule of Law', with an emphasis on the place of legal studies in the liberal arts.

Cathrine O. Frank is an Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Language Studies at the University of New England. Frank teaches and publishes in the areas of Victorian studies and law and literature. She has written on testamentary law and the realist novel as legal and literary modes of creating individual and cultural identity in such journals as Law and Literature, College Literature, and English Literature in Transition. She is author of the forthcoming Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture, 1837–1925: England's Novel Bequests.