Law and the Humanities

As a classicist and a social scientist with a legal background, I am particularly interested in how these fields intersect. Law and its associated institutions are represented in a society’s art and its culture. Likewise, there is a sense that law as a practical and theoretical discipline interacts extensively with a society’s creative expression and must also engage in interpretative exercises that the humanities can help inform.

For example, jurists might cite literature like Orwell or Shakespeare in legal opinions or arguments. Perhaps we can understand these as serving two purposes: first, as descriptive tools to illustrate concepts through familiar cultural references for a wide audience comprising legal experts and lay persons; second, in a more normative way that helps gain acceptance of a jurist’s interpretive, cultural, or moral claims, done in a way that shapes the social understanding of the art itself - which relies also on how the jurist themselves understands and chooses to represent the cultural artifact in question. This is linked to a common discourse in the legal profession that judges sometimes make poor, albeit powerful, historians.

While the interdisciplinary field of ‘law and the humanities’ has gained increasing recognition across a variety of American universities, it remains rather underexploited and unsystematic as its own field. While conferences and publications explore individual intersections between law and the humanities, there is, to my knowledge, no comprehensive, interdisciplinary conference, publication, or textbook.

To that end, I have been working with faculty and staff at the University of Wisconsin to develop a Certificate in Law and the Humanities. Specifically, I have assisted in developing the initial curriculum for a certificate program. I also designed and implemented a survey to measure student interest in the proposed certificate, the results of which returned overwhelming support from students who are interested in humanities but also plan to go to law school. I view this certificate as a somewhat theoretical offering compared to the more experiential and practical undergraduate legal studies curriculum offered by the University of Wisconsin.

I have also been writing the syllabus for an introductory course for the certificate, called Legal St 450: Introduction to Law and the Humanities. This introductory course explores two fundamental questions: what is law from a humanist perspective, and how can we apply humanist interpretive tools to the law? Students will survey various humanities disciplines, their creative works, and methods, examine how these disciplines represent and interpret law, and in turn analyze how law makes use of and represents the humanities. As the semester progresses, we will grow in complexity as we seek to understand various humanities disciplines, apply their methods, and creatively interpret law through a humanist lens. Students will come away understanding law not merely as a practical or social science discipline, but as an artistic and cultural endeavor.

Developing this course has introduced useful questions about how to organize and scope an interdisciplinary course generally, and especially in the case where both disciplines are wide-ranging, with many recursions of sub-disciplinary knowledge and expertise to which an instructor can never hope to give full treatment in a single semester. I plan to discuss some of these concerns in an upcoming blog post.

I am also interested in incorporating an exercise on government iconography into this introductory course, potentially as a supplement to the response papers that will form the core of the course’s assignments. In this exercise, I would provide students with a map highlighting key structures in Madison such as the State Capitol, Dane County Courthouse, and Bascom Hill, along with other buildings and monuments. Students would select and analyze iconography found at these sites and take a picture of the icon in question to include in their responses. Later in the semester, after developing a stronger grasp of humanist interpretive methods, they would revisit their initial selection, applying their expanded analytical skills to interpret, challenge, and re-interpret their chosen image as a way of balancing the continuity of a single chosen icon with the intellectual growth that students will undergo over the course of the semester.

I believe that interdisciplinary knowledge and curriculum are more valuable today than ever before, and this project has given me a meaningful opportunity to put that belief into practice across disciplines in which I am grateful to have expertise.