Order in the Courtroom: Law and Narrative Power

Catalog description

Whose story is Adjudicator Collins telling here? Would Samuel Jonathan Ramirez Perez, the detainee, tell the story different? How about the passengers? The pilot? If this were enacted as play or film, who would play the part of Canada? "Narrative is radical," said Toni Morrison when accepting her Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, "creating us at the very moment it is being created." Three years later, James Baldwin wrote: “The law is meant to be my servant and not my master, still less my torturer and my murderer.” Courtrooms are often portrayed as uniquely powerful places for disenfranchised individuals and peoples to “tell their story.” In this course, we will consider how law, legal venues, and legal workers are represented in literary and cultural texts. We will also examine how we can read critical and literary theory into legal analysis. This course aims to further a social justice politic by helping us think through the law, to see both the stories it tells and the stories it hides.