Literature scholars Matthew Anderson and Cathrine Frank publish an edited volume of scholarship exploring law and the humanities

The law plays a major, though variable, role in articulating values, ordering society, and dealing with conflict. Its institutions pervade much of people's lives and provide forums in which a culture's distinctive temper may find expression.

More than that, the sense of law so permeates a nation's cultural experience that it is possible for humanists, social scientists, and legal scholars alike to speak sensibly of "legal consciousness" as a legitimate, substantive term and object of study.

In Law and the Humanities: An Introduction, University of New England Professors Matthew Anderson, Ph.D., and Cathrine O. Frank, Ph.D.,  join Amherst College Professor Austin Sarat, Ph.D., J.D., in bringing together a collection of original chapters by a selection of distinguished scholars in both the law and the humanities from institutions around the world.

The selection focuses attention on a linked series of cross-disciplinary topics: ideas of justice; aesthetic representations of law; institutional processes such as testimony and punishment; and the rhetorical, narrative, and interpretive practices through which law does its work.

This book is, at one and the same time, a stock-taking of different national traditions and of the modes and subjects of law and humanities scholarship. It is also an effort to chart future directions for the field. By reviewing and analyzing existing scholarship, it offers both a resource and a provocation for a new approach to thinking about law.

"This collection is the first of its kind, and our hope is that it will be useful to scholars both in legal studies and in the liberal arts who want to learn more about this exciting, still-emerging field of interdisciplinary work in the humanities," Professor Anderson explains.

"In particular," adds Professor Frank, "one of the questions that the field of law and the humanities and the volume point towards is whether we might reframe legal studies as a discipline of the liberal arts, not just a professional training."

Essays in the collection range from "Biblical Justice: The Passion of the God of Justice" by Chaya Halberstam  to "Postmodern Justice" by Peter Goodrich; from "Law and Television: Screen Phenomena and Captive Audiences" by Susanna Lee to "The Constitution of History and Memory" by Ariela Gross.

Matthew Anderson and Cathrine Frank

Matthew Anderson (associate professor and chair) and Cathrine O. Frank (assistant professor) teach in UNE's Department of English and Language Studies. They have taught numerous courses on law and literature as well as broad-based interdisciplinary courses on themes of law and justice (e.g., "Freedom & Authority," "Women and the Law in Victorian England").

In June 2003, Anderson organized a Law & the Humanities conference, on the subject of "Guilt," at the University of New England. In 2005, he edited a special issue of Studies in Law, Politics, and Society, "Towards a Critique of Guilt: Perspectives from Law and the Humanities." He is currently working on a series of essays that combines an interest in law, trauma, and literature, particularly the way in which issues of trauma and justice and of the displacement of the sacred by the secular are registered in a wide range of texts.

Frank teaches and publishes in the areas of Victorian studies and law and literature. She has published essays in Law and Literature and in a special issue of College Literature focused on law and literature. Her book Law, Literature, and the Transmission of Culture in England, 1837-1925 is forthcoming with Ashgate Press in 2010. 

NEH Summer Institute

Frank and Anderson co-directed a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on "The Rule of Law: Legal Studies and the Liberal Arts," which brought twenty-five scholars from across the United States to live and study on the Biddeford campus for five weeks in June- July 2009. The institute was funded by a 165k grant from NEH.

They are co-editing with Sarat a book, Options for Teaching Literature and Law, forthcoming with the Modern Language Association.