Futures of Law and Literature: a Jurist's Perspective

In this article I build on arguments developed in recent work and elaborate on my thesis that it is crucial for the future of Law and Literature to (re)consider the bond of theory and practice in law and its importance for jurisprudence, on the view that legal meaning and justice are the products of discussions on how to establish concrete legal and social relations. So the quid-juris question is at the heart of legal doctrine and jurisprudence. What a humanistic approach can contribute to the jurist’s imagination that is necessary if law and justice are to thrive is that interpretation and deliberation cannot do without phronèsis, (practical wisdom in the Aristotelian sense) because in law knowledge is not a pre-existing truth but always a form of applied understanding, i.e. it brings together rules that are not self-applying, and contexts that may differ from case to case. The intertwinement of theory and practice has as its most prominent feature a focus on adjudication of which the judge is the exponent. Therefore I aim to focus on philosophical hermeneutics as developed by Paul Ricoeur, rich as his work is on the subjects of narrative, mimesis, metaphor and phronèsis, and also because of his insistence on the input of the humanities when it comes to developing judicial phronetic intelligence. Since the latter according to Ricoeur includes narrative intelligence, and he himself elaborates on the Aristotelian thesis that knowledge requires insight into the mimetic representation, what narratology can offer by way of providing insight into how the human mind deals with the very idea of ‘story’ is also of the utmost importance. In short, I hope to show that hermeneutics and narratology can contribute building blocks to a humanistic model of judging.