Hinterland

The voyage that this book is a reflection of started in the late 1970s when I was studying for an MA in English and American literature. In those days, the teaching staff at Utrecht University, the Netherlands, consisted of a mix of staunch defenders of New Criticism and early adepts of narratology, post-colonialism and deconstruction, a combination that often left us students baffled as we oscillated between memorising metaphysical poetry and excavating texts for hidden, ideological meanings. These methodologies generated in me an acute interest in what people do to and with language. When I began my legal education, I was driven by the idea that law is what people do to one another by means of language. But disappointment awaited. Rule-oriented courses were the main staple. Where were the people to whom the rules applied? What did it mean to apply a rule? What did one actually do when one said one did? What view on language was there behind the notion of rule application? No answers were given, simply because such questions did not matter much. However, when I took courses in legal philosophy and the history of ideas of law – revealingly called, as they still are today, meta-juridica – I understood that the reflective methodology of the humanities had its place in law.

This formative moment caused a shift in my academic focus. While searching for a dissertation topic, I came across Richard Posner's Law and Literature. The book came as a double shock. The very idea of a bond existing between law and literature was immensely consoling, yet Posner's elaboration seemed restrictive. It reduced the importance of a literary turn of mind for legal practice. As I continued my parallel education in law and literature, I experienced that in the humanities departments the topic met with suspicion. I was, more or less, hounded out as a traitor to the humanities, for we all knew that law had absolutely nothing to do with the postmodern study of literature, did we not? Fortunately, Erasmus School of Law offered me the opportunity to pursue my goal. In the works of James Boyd White and Richard Weisberg, the revitalisation of the two early twentieth-century challenges provoked by John Wigmore and Benjamin Cardozo was both aspirational and critical in nature.