The Law as Mirrored in Literature

The Pen and the Sword: Dangerous Liaisons?

No doubt there are people who believe that the law is the exclusive domain of the legal profession— that it arises from a system of “normative management” whose exact formulas are known to lawyers alone, and that any intrusion into this so-called “positive” field of the law by lay persons is nothing but ….literature. I fear that such people will not be interested in the dialogue that I propose to them.

If, on the other hand, one believes, as many do, that the law maintains an essential relationship with the “imaginary institution of society,” as Castoriadis would put it, that it touches the “institution of the human,” as Legendre would say, that it contributes in an essential way to the constitution of “a shared symbolic order,” to use Ricoeur’s terms—in a word, that its proper function is to express the collective values of a society and to furnish guidelines to individuals, then one can understand that the confluence of the law and literature is not coincidental.