Introduction: law, literature, and ethnic subjects.

The question is that of the canon: what (and who) is given voice; who privileged, repeated, and invoked; who silenced, ignored, submerged, and marginalized. Law and literature have shared traditions--of silencing, of pushing certain stories to the margin and of privileging others. An obvious example in literature is the exclusion of certain books from the canon of the "great books."

--Judith Resnik, "Constructing the Canon" (221)

There has been little engagement of the canon and of the notion of the canon. Literature was urged upon the law school with creative pluck. After the agenda made room for Homer and Melville, however, the audacity and openness stalled. For the most part, studies in Law and Literature still do not venture outside a narrow range of standard, Harvard-and-its-sisters approved literature. Where are the new, more difficult translations, the equivalents in our practice to the topics Fish refers to in English studies: "The Trickster Figure in Chicano and Black Literature" or "Lesbian Feminist Poetry in Texas"?

--Milner Ball, "Confessions" (190)

In March 2000 over three hundred scholars interested in the study of American multiethnic literatures gathered in New Orleans for a MELUS conference entitled "Multi-Ethnic Literatures and the Idea of Social Justice." The driving force of the conference was the recognition that while issues of social justice are among the most important concerns of minority writers, the works of these writers have largely been ignored by the "law and literature" movement in the legal academy. The call of the conference was explicit: to engage in the active de-canonization of the field of law and literature, and to show through example how the inclusion of literature emerging from a wide variety of ethnic experiences in America would challenge the settled assumptions of the field.

To be sure, as our epigraphs suggest, this is not the first time that the issue of canonicity in the domain of law and literature has been raised. In a seminal article published in 1990, Carolyn Heilbrun and Judith Resnick demonstrated the overwhelmingly masculinist bias of the law and literature movement. Drawing on Elizabeth Villiers Gemmette's 1987 empirical survey of law and literature courses in thirty-eight law schools, the authors argued that the study of literature in law schools assumes "that if not totally absent, women are the other, the object of the male gaze, the subject of the discussion, not the speaker" (1914). Furthermore, they noted a significant time-lag between scholarship being conducted in literary studies on the one hand and the law and literature movement on the other. Much of what Heilbrun and Resnick noted in 1990 about the marginality of feminism and women's literature in the law and literature movement is parallel to our own concerns about the continued marginality of multiethnic literatures in this movement. "The really bad old days of literary criticism (and much else) have been left further behind by literature than by legal studies," state Heilbrun and Resnick. "Feminist criticism and post-structuralist criticism have had almost twenty years in which to perfect theories and techniques, and to revise ideas of what to read and what to value. Surely law could well benefit from the fruits of those decades, both in the reading of the new literature by women now available and in the reading and interpretation of texts not usually read in law classes" (1933).

Scholars who have tracked the field might differ on the weight they place on the transformative effects of the Heilbrun and Resnick article. But that article, along with others written at about the same time, seems to have spoken to a pressing need for a change in the orientation of the field. (1) In her follow-up survey, conducted in 1993, Elizabeth Villiers Gemette says, "The most notable changes from the titles in the earlier survey relate to courses dealing exclusively with women and the law, none of which were reported in the earlier survey." ("Joining the Class Action" 665). At least two collections of essays on the law and literature movement from feminist perspectives were also published in the nineties and issues of gender have become important loci of scholarly debate in the field. (2)

While such developments seem encouraging, it is important to note that the efforts to have a more inclusive law and literature canon have not been without their detractors. Perhaps the best known of these is Richard Weisberg, long-time editor of the journal Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature and author of two widely read books in the field. Responding to the feminist call to have a more diverse curricular canon, Weisberg notes in his 1992 book Poethics that the admittedly traditional literary canon of law and literary studies needs no revision since it is often "self-imploding," which is to say that it has within it elements of self-critique. In defending the continued teaching of the traditional canon, Weisberg resorts to a common argument that circulated in the literary academy at the height of the canon wars: that what matters most pedagogically is not the choice of texts (by women or minority writers) but the approaches that one uses to read them. Hence he points out that Heilbrun and Resnick tend to undervalue the feminist work in law and literature that preceded them only because it found the traditional male canon the primary subject of its study (Poethics 118-19).

Without rehashing this particular aspect of the debate which pits interpretive strategies against choice of texts, we would suggest that the ideal scenario is one in which there is a balance between a number of critical approaches and a diverse range of texts. Readings of the traditional canon that approach it from feminist or race-conscious perspectives are, of course, a very important aspect of literary scholarship. But they cannot be held to be sufficient. A more inclusionary canon that draws on works that come out of the ethnic experience or the experience of women is, we believe, integral to the literary education of lawyers who are to serve in an increasingly diverse world. We do not share Weisberg's fear that by opening up the canon we will overlook the "greatness" of the "masterpieces." Nor are we persuaded by the specious link between affirmative action, great literature, and redefining the canon in the following statement he makes: "In any case, I am not convinced that female writers in particular need affirmative action to rise to the deserved ranks of greatness" (Poethics 122, emphasis in text). What is arguable is not just the necessity for affirmative action, but rather how "greatness" is thrust upon a writer.

Defending his choice to focus on the traditional canon in his first book The Failure of the Word, Weisberg writes in his later work that he did so "not to exclude lesser-known voices but to prepare for their full integration" (Poethics xii). Yet judging by his later work, it does not seem that Weisberg thinks that the time is right even now to fully integrate any of these "lesser-known voices." (3) While, as we pointed out earlier, an alternative scholarly tradition, led in the main by feminists and to a lesser extent by scholars interested in issues of race and ethnicity, has surely emerged, the most heavily cited texts in the field, such as Richard Posner's Law and Literature demonstrate a marked nostalgia towards a lost era before the Civil War when lawyers and judges were trained in the classical tradition, and ideas of the good and the virtuous were untainted by the claims, demands, and experiences of a heterogenous civil society.

If our reading of the dominant trend in law and literature scholarship seems insufficiently empirical, one may consider the following. In the twelve years plus that the Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature has been in business, it has published one article explicitly on a minority writer (Tiefenbrun, 1992) and one that is centrally concerned with issues of race (Thomas, "Plessy" 1997). In the twelve years plus that the other major journal in the field, the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities, has been in existence, it has published one article explicitly concerned with the intersections of race in the field of law and literature (Clarke, 1991). Indeed, even a wider search of law reviews and full-length texts shows a telling silence in this field. While the focus on narratives on the part of the critical race theorists has encouraged thinking in this direction, the actual works analyzing literary texts written by ethnic minorities are few and far between. (4) While the call issued by Carolyn Heilbrun and Judith Resnik for the inclusion and study of texts written by women is gradually beginning to be met, we feel that a similar emphasis needs to be made about the increased inclusion of work by ethnic minorities.

In this special issue, we have collected, from the many fine presentations at the 2000 MELUS Conference, seven essays that investigate the intersections of law, ethnicity, and social justice in literature, ranging from poetry, the novel, short fiction, and autobiography, to other genres, such as the corrido. The essays consider literary productions as representations of social injustice and as acts of resistance on the part of ethnic subjects in different historical moments of United States history. Historical injustices cited include slavery, lynching, immigration restrictions, and other acts of oppression in violation of fundamental civil and human rights, often state-sanctioned, against internal and external ethnic populations. In most instances, the relationship between social injustice and literature is more immediate than metaphorical, with the law often serving as both the obstacle to be overcome as well as the vehicle of redress. More important, the essays illustrate how individuals' encounters with legal and extra-legal oppression become fixed in the memories and narratives of minority populations, emerging as canonical moments of ethnic identity in a not yet free and equal America. But in these essays, multiethnic literature also serves as a space for the resolution of social inequities, not by virtue of a fantasy projection into an unproblematic future, but by a determined impulse to set the record straight about the lived experiences of ethnic Americans.

In "Celtic Women and White Guilt: Frankie Silver and Chipita Rodriguez in Folk Memory," Rachel Jennings details the histories of Silver and Rodriguez, nineteenth-century women executed as axe-murderers. Each condemned woman's story became the subject of twentieth-century women writers' attempts to mine local legend for artistic purposes, including a 1998 novel by Sharyn McCrumb, The Ballad of Frankie Silver, and two poetic retellings of Rodriguez' story: Rachel Bluntzer Hebert's 1942 epic poem Shadow on the Nueces and Teresa Palomo Acosta's 1999 poem "Chipita." Jennings' essay concerns the strategic representations of gender and ethnicity in the works of Hebert and McCrumb. She argues that each author's investment in the characters' literary exoneration largely recapitulates the amelioration of guilt feelings experienced by the communities that commemorated Silver and Rodriguez in folk narratives, after allowing them to be executed on circumstantial evidence. According to Jennings, Hebert and McCrumb "do not provide 'voices' for Silver and Rodriguez so much as reflect upon the historical development of their own white female identity." She argues that the attention paid by both writers to the Irish American ethnicity of the communities in which Silver and Rodriguez lived obscures other more complicated questions of ethnic, racial, class, and gender allegiances. Jennings' essay concludes with an analysis of Acosta's poem about Chipita Rodriguez, showing how Acosta is less concerned with the crime and execution, instead focusing on the appropriation of minority women's voices by Anglo American female writers.

Luis Mendoza's essay, "The Re-education of a Xicanindio: Raul Salinas and the Poetics of Pinto Transformation," examines how prison authors depict incarceration as a scene of enlightenment into a political consciousness of radical resistance. Mendoza identifies conscientizacion as a ritual of transformation from random social rebelliousness into political resistance forged in the 1960s and 70s era, which he characterizes as "the US Prison Rebellion years." Focusing on the evolution of Salinas into prisoner rights activist and man of letters, Mendoza makes the provocative claim that the prison served as the unacknowledged incubator of cultural studies and as a serious intellectual space. As Mendoza shows, Salinas' active participation in the development of a multiethnic academics of political resistance in various state and federal penal institutions, as a university student, and in the formative student/prisoner political alliances of the period makes his career paradigmatic of a generation of prisoners-turned-activists. Mendoza concludes with a consideration of Salinas' brand of prison writing as a space of resistance to genre conventions, an inseparable amalgam of political agency and literary craft, and a context-specific engagement with systemic social repression.

Christina Accomando's "Demanding a Voice among the Pettifoggers: Sojourner Truth as Legal Actor" declares that the epitome of the unjust social system was the slave state. While Mendoza describes the post-60s prison activism that resulted in broad-based strategies of resistance from jailhouse lawyering to collective acts of civil disobedience, Accomando makes clear through Sojourner Truth's ascent from slave to "legal actor" that engaging the law as "both an agent of oppression and a potential tool of resistance" has had a long history in the US, with its own distinguished literary canon. For Accomando, Truth's significance lies in her willingness to "use the law even while she challenges its legitimacy," beginning with her self-emancipation from her master on grounds of his promise to free her, to her later court battles for promise to free her, to her later court battles for the assaults on her family's freedom and her own dignity as an American citizen. Slavery's rendering of African Americans as non-persons haunted Truth's life, as she was first forced to prove her biological relationship to her own son before being able to get his sale into southern slavery annulled, and then forced to defend herself from slanderous accusations and physical abuse by whites through court actions. Accomando argues that, more than her own (often unreliably recorded) statements of self-worth, Truth's assertion of personhood through litigation represents an important departure from the many instances of slave narrators who wrote themselves into existence.

But for every Sojourner Truth, there were many more for whom the legal system did not work, for whom the failure of laws and law enforcement to produce justice included turning an official blind eye to flagrant injustice. In "'No Justice, No Peace': The Figure of Emmett Till in African American Literature," Christopher Metress offers a catalog of contemporary writers whose works have kept alive the story of the Chicago native lynched in Mississippi in 1955, including Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and John Edgar Wideman. Focusing on the 1960 Brooks poem "A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother Bums Bacon"; Baldwin's 1964 play, Blues for Mister Charlie; Lorde's 1981 poem "Afterimages"; and Bebe Moore Campbell's 1992 novel Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, Metress demonstrates that the persistence of Till as a figure in African American literature constitutes a scripted form of civil disobedience, an attempt to disturb the majority contentment with the fiction of "liberty and justice for all" in the absence of legal remedy. Just as Till's mother insisted on an open casket funeral to disrupt American amnesia about racial oppression, in the wake of an all-white Mississippi jury's acquittal of the murderers and their subsequent publication of the details of their crime in a national magazine, African American writers have maintained an unrelenting campaign of agitation about the Till lynching that underscores the relation between social injustice and literary production by ethnic minorities. As a spate of recent histories and film documentaries attest, the Till episode serves as a canonical moment in contemporary culture, a moment of shared consciousness-raising and personal anguish over racial injustice. Metress goes on to say that these fictional meditations on the crime and its aftermath demonstrate a collective intent to spur national remorse and resolution.

The determination of African American writers to keep the brutalized body of Emmett Till in the public eye suggests one type of literary response to America's "body politics." Another is described by June Dwyer's "Disease, Deformity, and Deviance: Writing the Language of Immigration Law and the Eugenics Movement on the Immigrant Body." Dwyer examines early twentieth-century immigration laws with respect to their catalogs of physical and moral deficiencies which disqualified immigrants from entry into the nation. She detects discursive traces of the propaganda rhetoric of the eugenics movement, whose official and unofficial spokespersons sought to "improve" the American gene pool through immigration restrictions and other forms of social engineering. This statutory language of disease, deformity, and depravity haunted ethnic communities, according to Dwyer, and left traces in the literature of their difficult assimilation into the US. Dwyer examines the fiction of Anzia Yezierska, a Jewish immigrant from Poland at the turn of the century, and Mary Gordon, a third-generation Irish American, to illustrate the effects of the pathologizing language of alien otherness on ethnic Americans. While the influence of this "eugenic gaze" as an active agent of social control over immigrant communities is clear in the stories of both Yezierska and Gordon, Dwyer locates differences in their temporal proximity to the immigrant experience and the way in which the "eugenic gaze" impacts the consciousness of their ethnic newcomers. Dwyer shows how the radically different responses of Yezierska's and Gordon's characters, ranging from resistance to resignation and despair, reflect the degree to which they have internalized the "eugenic gaze," which tends to "pigeonhole immigrants, improve them if possible, and dismiss them if not."

Anne Shea's essay, "'Don't Let Them Make You Feel You Did a Crime': Immigration Law, Labor Rights, and Farmworker Testimony," likewise grapples with the issues of internalized self-image, enforced silence, and resistance among immigrant communities. Shea addresses the marginal statuses of contemporary migrant farmworker populations, both illegals and legal "guestworkers," describing the testimony of the workers as a reclamation of "voice" against a system that silences them. Arguing that migrant workers are denied entrance into "official" stories, which is the privilege of legal agents, Shea turns to worker testimonies to understand how they "negotiate among the legal scripts, the storyline of the employers, and the actual practices of their employers." She notes the image of aliens crafted in alarmist calls for border security and its complicity with depictions of the migrant farmworker as a necessary evil in sustaining the "American way of life." She highlights the hypocrisy of giant agribusinesses that manipulate the myth of the American yeoman farmer to craft an image of American rugged individualism for consumers, while extracting governmental concessions in immigration laws to ensure the greater profits attainable through access to a cheap, expendable, and state-terrorized work force. Thus, according to Shea, making the illegal immigrant a visible threat to American values facilitates the silencing and invisibility of the guestworker, who exists in a liminal social space as non-citizen "laborer." She argues that farmworkers' acquisition of "voice" through testimony disrupts this process. Using media reportage, informant interviews, and literary texts, she explains how worker counter-narratives function as "simultaneously cultural and political instruments" of resistance and self-validation among border subjects, asserting their humanity, personal integrity, and kinship bonds in the face of social erasure.

The erasure of kinship bonds by immigration laws is also an important thread in our final essay by Greg Mullins, "Seeking Asylum: Literary Reflections on Sexuality, Ethnicity, and Human Rights." Mullins details the evolution of US immigration laws on asylum exemptions for reasons of persecution based on sexual orientation. Despite the progressive nature of these asylum grants, humanitarian exemptions for aliens seeking refuge from persecution of sexual orientation emerged as a compromise between meeting America's commitments under international agreements and responding to strong anti-immigrant feelings among the American populace. Carefully reviewing the statutes and case law regarding asylum for membership in a persecuted "social group," Mullins recounts how homosexual "identity" became grounds for asylum, while homosexual "behavior" continued to serve as grounds for deportation. Using literary works by Reinaldo Arenas, Elias Miguel Munoz, and Shyam Selvadurai, Mullins claims that literature of immigration and sexual orientation advances our understanding of crucial legal terms such as "family," "ethnicity," and "social group" in the context of sexual orientation persecution cases in ways that are instructive for the framers of asylum policy. For Mullins, extending the legal definition of "persecution" to include acts in the private sphere, especially within the biological family, also acknowledges the specificity of lived experience reflected in literature about individuals oppressed for sexual orientation. Extending the definition of "social group" to include "voluntary and associational relationships" would similarly take advantage of the insights available in multiethnic literatures of immigrant experience.

The possibility of a mutually beneficial relationship between law and literature frames not just Mullins' piece, but all the essays in this volume. Legal issues are generally considered to be outside the realm of literature, and fictional texts on issues of social justice are typically marginal to the field of law. But as the authors in this collection demonstrate, both terrains stand much to gain from conversation with each other. If we end on a cautionary note, it is only because we make no radical claims for social enlightenment or the scrupulous correspondence between law and justice based on literary interventions. If anything, most of the work in this area currently speaks more to the struggle to be heard rather than to resounding success. However, as the texts listed below suggest, a significant beginning has been made, even if much remains to be done. We hope that this collection will be an invitation to further scholarship in the intersections between minority literatures and social justice.

Notes

We would like to thank Professor Veronica Makowsky for all her editorial wisdom and the MELUS staff for managing the production of this volume.

(1.) See Resnik, "Constructing;" Resnick, "Changing;" Delgado and Stefancic.

(2.) See Heinzelman and Wiseman; St. Joan and McElhiney.

(3.) We are aware that Richard Weisberg may disagree here. He notes, for instance, that he teaches Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye in his classes. He also cites Gemmette's 1989 survey to suggest that "many instructors feature numerous works of women, minorities, and culturally diverse writers" (Poethics 119). But Gemmette's survey shows nothing of the sort. In the inclusion of the writings of ethnic minorities, for instance, only two texts show up: Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man which is used in one course and Richard Wright's Native Son which is used in two ("Unnecessarily Suspect" 322-40).

(4.) See Kupenda, Suggs, Tobin.

SELECTED REFERENCES

Note: The following selected references draw upon the scholarship that has explicitly emerged under the "Law and Literature" movement or has significantly articulated itself in relation to that scholarly terrain. Very little work has appeared on the writers who are the primary focus of this collection. In this bibliography we list the scholarship that has engaged with minority literatures as well as some of the canonical and heavily cited texts in the field. We intend it to be a resource for scholars in literary studies interested more generally in the Law and Literature movement as well as in its specific engagement with multiethnic literatures.

Ball, Milner. "Confessions." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 1.2 (1989): 185-97.

Bell, Derrick A., Jr. And We Are Not Saved: The Elusive Quest for Racial Justice. New York: Basic Books, 1987.

--. Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. New York: Basic Books, 1992.

--. Race, Racism and American Law. 3rd ed. Boston: Little, Brown, 1992.

Binder, Guyora and Robert Weisberg. Literary Criticisms of Law. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2000.

Brooks, Peter. "A Slightly Polemical Comment on Austin Sarat." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2 (1998): 409-12.

Brown, Jane. "Law, Literature and the Problems of Interdisciplinarity." Yale Law Journal 108.5 (1999): 1059-85.

Cardozo, Benjamin. Law and Literature and Other Essays. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1931.

Chang, Robert S. "Toward an Asian American Legal Scholarship: Critical Race Theory, Post-Structuralism, and Narrative Space." California Law Review 81 (1994): 1053-1125.

Clarke, Stuart Alan. "Color-Blind Prophets and Bootstrap Philosophies: Straw Men, Shell Games and Social Criticism." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 3.1 (1991): 83-96.

Clayton, Ellen Wright and Jay Clayton. "Afterword: Voices and Violence--A Dialogue." Vanderbilt Law Review 43.6 (1990): 1807-18.

Coombe, Rosemary. "Critical Cultural Legal Studies." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2 (1998): 463-86.

Cornell, Drucilla. The Philosophy of the Limit. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Covington, Robert. "Law as Text: A Response to Professor Michael Ryan." Vanderbilt Law Review 43.6 (1990): 1787-95.

Crenshaw, Kimberle. "Toward a Race-Conscious Pedagogy in Legal Education." National Black Lawyer's Journal 11 (1989): 1-14.

Culture and the Law. Spec. issue of South Atlantic Quarterly 100.4 (2001). Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Spec. issue of Cardozo Law Review 11.5-6 (1990).

Delgado, Richard and Jean Stefancic. "Norms and Narratives: Can Judges Avoid Serious Moral Error?" Texas Law Review 69 (1991): 1929-60.

Delgado, Richard. The Rodrigo Chronicles: Conversations about America and Race. New York: New York UP, 1995.

--. When Equality Ends: Stories About Race and Resistance. Boulder CO: Westview, 1999.

Dimock, Wai Chee. Residues of Justice: Literature, Law and Philosophy. Berkeley: U of California P, 1996.

Doyle, James. "The Lawyers' Act: 'Representation' in Capital Cases." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 8.2 (1996): 417-49.

Dunlop, C.R.B. "Literature Studies in Law Schools." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 3.1 (1991): 63-110.

Fish, Stanley. "Response: Interpretation is Not a Theoretical Issue." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 11.2 (1999): 509-15.

--. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.

Freeman, Michael and Andrew D.E. Lewis, Ed. Law and Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1999.

Gemmette, Elizabeth Villiers. "Law and Literature: An Unnecessarily Suspect Class in the Liberal Arts Component of the Law School Curriculum." Valparaiso University Law Review 23.2 (1989): 267-340.

--. "Law and Literature: Joining the Class Action." Valparaiso Law Review 19 (1995): 665-762.

Gutierrez-Jones, Carl. Rethinking the Borderlands: Between Chicano Culture and Legal Discourse. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

Halley, Janet. "Notes from the Editorial Advisory Board." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2 (1998): 389-400.

Heilbrun, Carolyn and Judith Resnik. "Convergences: Law, Literature and Feminism." Yale Law Journal 99.8 (1990): 1912-56.

Heinzelman, Susan Sage and Zipporah Batshaw Wiseman, Ed. Representing Women: Law, Literature and Feminism. Durham: Duke UP, 1994.

Johnson, Barbara. "The Alchemy of Style and Law." The Rhetoric of Law. Ed. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1994. 261-74.

Kupenda, Angela Mae. "Law, Life and Literature: A Critical Reflection of Life and Literature to Illuminate How Laws of Domestic Violence, Race, and Class Bind Black Women Based on Alice Walker's Book The Third Life of Grange Copeland." Howard Law Journal 42.1 (1998): 1-26.

Ledwon, Lenora, Ed. Law and Literature: Text and Theory. New York: Garland, 1995.

Levinson, Sanford and Steven Mailloux, Ed. Interpreting Law and Literature: A Hermeneutic Reader. Evanston: Northwestern UP, 1988.

Lopez, Ian F. Henry. White By Law: The Legal Construction of Race. New York: New York UP, 1996.

Lubiano, Wahneema, Ed. The House that Race Built: Black Americans, US Terrain. New York: Pantheon, 1997.

Matsuda, Mari, Charles Lawrence III, Richard Delgado, and Kimberle Crenshaw, Ed. Words That Wound: Critical Race Theory, Assaultive Speech, and the First Amendment. Boulder CO: Westview P, 1993.

Minda, Gary. Postmodern Legal Movements: Law and Jurisprudence at Century's End. New York: New York UP, 1995.

--. "Law and Literature at Century's End." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 9.2 (1997): 245-58.

Minow, Martha. "Identities." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 3.1 (1991): 97-130.

--. "Words and the Door to the Land of Change: Law, Language, and Family Violence." Vanderbilt Law Review 43.6 (1990): 1665-99.

--. Not Only For Myself: Identity, Politics and the Law. New York: New Press, 1998.

Morawetz, Thomas. "Empathy and Judgment." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 8.2 (1996): 517-31.

Nussbaum, Martha. Poetic Justice. Boston: Beacon P, 1995.

Pacher, Daniela K. "Aesthetics vs. Ideology: The Motives Behind 'Law and Literature.'" Columbia-VLA Journal of Law and the Arts 14.4 (1990): 587-614.

Pantazakos, Michael. "Ad Humanitatem Pertinent: A Personal Reflection on the History and Purpose of the Law and Literature Movement." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 7.1 (1995): 31-71.

Papke, David Ray. "Neo-Marxists, Nietzscheans, and New Critics: The Voices of the Contemporary Law and Literature Discourse." American Bar Foundation Research Journal (1985): 883-97.

Posner, Richard A. Law and Literature. Revised and Enlarged Edition. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1998.

Resnik, Judith. "Constructing the Canon." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 2.1 (1990): 221-30.

--."Changing the Topic." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 8.2 (1996): 339-62.

--. "On the Margin: Humanities and Law." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2 (1998): 413-20.

Rockwood, Bruce, Ed. Law and Literature Perspectives. New York: Peter Lang, 1998.

Ryan, Michael. "Social Violence and Political Representation." Vanderbilt Law Review 43.6 (1990): 1771-85.

Sarat, Austin. "Traditions and Trajectories in Law and Humanities Scholarship." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2 (1998): 401-07.

Seaton, James. "Law and Literature: Works, Criticism, and Theory." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 11.2 (1999): 479-507.

Smith, Felipe. American Body Politics: Race, Gender and the Black Literary Renaissance. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1998.

St. Joan, Jacqueline and Annette B. McElhiney, Ed. Beyond Portia: Women, Law and Literature in the United States Boston: Northeastern UP, 1997.

Suggs, Jon-Christian. Whispered Consolations: Law and Narrative in African American Life. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2000.

"Symposium on Law, Literature and the Humanities" University of Cincinnati Law Review 63.1 (1994): 1-402

"Symposium on To Kill a Mockingbird. "Alabama Law Review 45.2 (1994): 389-584

Thomas, Brook. "Plessy v. Ferguson and the Literary Imagination." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 9.1 (1997): 45-65.

--. American Literary Realism and the Failed Promise of Contract. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997.

--. Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987.

--. "China Men, United States v. Wond Kim Ark, and the Question of Citizenship" American Quarterly 50.4 (1998): 689-717.

Tiefenbrun, Susan. "Semiotics and Martin Luther King's 'Letter from Birmingham Jail'" Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 4.2 (1992): 255-87.

Tobin, Elizabeth. "Imagining the Mother's Text: Toni Morrison's Beloved and Contemporary Law." Harvard Women's Law Journal 16 (1993): 233-73.

Weiner, Mark S. "'Naturalization' and Naturalization Law: Some Empirical Observations." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 10.2 (1998): 657-66.

Weisberg, Richard. The Failure of the Word: The Protagonist as Lawyer in Modern Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1984.

--. "Family Feud: A Response to Robert Weisberg on Law and Literature." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 1.1 (1988): 69-78

--. Poethics and Other Strategies of Law and Literature. New York: Columbia UP, 1992.

Weisberg, Robert. "The Law-Literature Enterprise." Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities 1.1 (1988): 1-67.

West, Cornel. "The Role of Law in Progressive Politics." Vanderbilt Law Review 43.6 (1990): 1797-1806

West, Robin "Communities, Texts, and Law: Reflections on the Law and Literature Movement." Yale Journal of Law and Humanities 10.2 (1998): 129-56.

--. "Toward Humanistic Theories of Legal Justice." Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature 10.2 (1998): 147-50

--. Narrative, Authority and Law. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1993. White, James B. The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression. Boston: Little, Brown, 1973.

Williams, Patricia. The Alchemy of Race and Rights. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.

Ziolkowski, Theodore J. The Mirror of Justice: Literary Reflections of Legal Crisis. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1997.

Gaurav Desai is Associate Professor of English and African and African Diaspora Studies at Tulane University. Author of Subject to Colonialism: African Self-Fashioning and the Colonial Library (Duke UP 2001), he has also served as guest editor of a special issue of South Atlantic Quarterly on "Culture and the Law" (100.4, 2001). Please visit him on the web at http://www.tulane.edu/~gaurav.

Felipe Smith is an Associate Professor of English at Tulane University where he has also served as Director of African and African Diaspora Studies. His 1998 book American Body Politics: Race, Gender, and Black Literary Renaissance (U of Georgia P) addresses the cultural politics of the racial and gender classification of American bodies as a shaping influence in the development of writers such as W.E.B. Du Bois, Charles W. Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, and James Weldon Johnson around the turn of the last century. He has also published essays on Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club.

Supriya Naif is an Associate Professor of English at Tulane University. She is the author of Caliban's Curse: George Lamming and the Revisioning of History (U of Michigan P, 1996). Among her other publications are essays in American Literary History, Research in African Literatures, and South Atlantic Quarterly.