The law as mirrored in literature

No doubt there are people who believe that the law is the exclusive domain of the legal profession— that it arises from a system of "normative management" whose exact formulas are known to lawyers alone, and that any intrusion into this so-called "positive" field of the law by lay persons is nothing but ....literature. I fear that such people will not be interested in the dialogue that I propose to them. If, on the other hand, one believes, as many do, that the law maintains an essential relationship with the "imaginary institution of society," as Castoriadis would put it, that it touches the "institution of the human," as Legendre would say, that it contributes in an essential way to the constitution of "a shared symbolic order," to use Ricoeur's terms—in a word, that its proper function is to express the collective values of a society and to furnish guidelines to individuals, then one can understand that the confluence of the law and literature is not coincidental. Further, an important "Law and Literature" movement has developed in the United States, with its retinue of journals, colloquia, and university courses. In France and Belgium this approach has yet to take root, though one can detect a few stirrings of interest. But it is encouraging that these first inquiries, albeit modest, arise from the intersection of the interests of the literary and legal professions. Thus fruitful interdisciplinary encounters are made possible, with less risk of an overdetermination of one discipline by another, less risk of reducing either to the ancillary role of alibi or something to be exploited.