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Law and Humanities   
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Law and Humanities
When the humanities were created as separate disciplines in fourteenth-century Italy, the studia humanitatis, they were meant as both an aid and a challenge to the already established professional subjects of theology, medicine and law.  That is still the case today.  There are essentially two missions in the courses of the Law School that fall under this subject.  The first and more technical goal is to strengthen the forms of thought and writing that students bring to legal subjects through the study of rhetoric, criticism, grammar and argument.  This aspect of the subject focuses on the general nature of language and how to use it more effectively in a legal context.  The second goal is to widen a student's horizons on legal subjects through the use of history, imaginative works of literature and moral philosophy.  Liberal studies, so defined, came originally from the word liber, meaning free person.  The assumption behind the definition has always been that only individuals capable of independent thought are truly free of the limitations around them.  The ultimate goal, then, of Law and Humanities is to prepare students of law to think ofr themselves and to bring their own originality to bear on the problems that they will encounter in their professional lives. 
Courses

L6200 THE ART OF LEGAL PERSUASION (3 pts)
(see 1L Electives)

L6500 CONNECTIONS OF LAW AND LITERATURE (3 pts)
R. Ferguson
We will explore the uses of literature in understanding the theory and the practice of law. At one level, seminal literary texts that every lawyer should know will provide a proving ground for examining legal norms and professional performance. At another level, we will be using both literature and literary criticism to study the nature of legal language. What are the common rhetorical and linguistic devices that every lawyer employs more-or-less unawares? How do the uses and misuses of these devices produce the stereotypes that control popular understanding of the legal process and how can we guard ourselves against those stereotypes? How can a heightened appreciation of the artifice in language help to bring success in the advocacy process? At a third level, attention will be given to recent debates in law and literature for what they can tell us about the nature of legal education today.

The course will also aim for a cumulative but still practical sense of legal eloquence and its components. A proper knowledge of context, audience, narrative form, rhetorical strategy, storytelling, point of view, generic awareness, and description will remind you that a good mouthpiece is first and always a careful wordsmith.

Charles Dickens' Bleak House will be used in every class. Course members must read this novel before the course begins.

Other Recent Courses

The following is not offered in 2007-2008 but is part of the regular course offerings at Columbia Law School.

L8250 SEMINAR: KAFKA AND THE LAW (2 pts)
"Kafka" and "Kafkaesque" have become part of the English language,often applied to the law. Franz Kafka, indeed, was a prominent labor lawyer in Prague, from 1907-1922, working as a high-ranking bureaucrat at the partly state-run Workers' Accident Insurance Institute for the Kingdom of Bohemia. His voluminous legal writings have now been translated into English; and for this seminar students will be able to read in English for the first time Kafka's recently translated (as yet unpublished) writings. We will explore them along with his fictional and autobiographical writings for insight into their interrelationships. Among our subjects will be Kafka's real involvement in the practice of Austro-Hungarian law; his concern with matters of interpersonal judgment ("The Judgment") and social justice (The Man who Disappeared); his fictional constructions of legal matters (The Trial and such stories and parables as "Before the Law" and "On the Question of the Laws"); and his conception of law as a metaphysical category of highest authority ("My ultimate aim," Kafka wrote, is to "strive to answer to a supreme tribunal").

This page is maintained by Jill Marden