Law’s Blind Spots and Literature’s Vision: Why Law Needs Literature?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31305/rrijm.2026.v11.n01.023Keywords:
Law and Literature, Critical Legal Studies, Literary Criticism, Literary Oppression, Forms of Interpretation, Postcolonial Legal Theory, Narrative JurisprudenceAbstract
This paper re-examines the foundational premises of the Law and Literature movement through a critical lens that interrogates not merely whether law needs literature, but how literary consciousness has become indispensable to contemporary legal practice in an era of intersectional justice claims and postcolonial legal pluralism. Whilst seminal scholars such as White, Cover, and Nussbaum established literature's capacity to humanise legal reasoning, this study extends their frameworks by demonstrating how narrative theory, rhetorical analysis, and interpretive hermeneutics operate as constitutive—not merely supplementary—elements of legal legitimacy. Through comparative analysis of canonical Western texts (Dickens, Dostoevsky, Shakespeare, Kafka) and underexamined postcolonial narratives (Anam, Devi, Ramanujan), the article exposes law's structural blind spots: its inability to apprehend subaltern experiences, its dependence on metaphorical reasoning disguised as logic, and its reliance on legal fictions that demand literary suspension of disbelief. The paper argues that literature does not simply critique law from the outside but reveals law's own narrative infrastructure—demonstrating that legal formalism without literary consciousness devolves into what Kafka prophesied: procedure severed from purpose, authority divorced from justice. By foregrounding postcolonial case studies alongside canonical works, this study challenges the Eurocentric foundations of Law and Literature scholarship and demonstrates how literary analysis exposes the foundational violence embedded in ostensibly neutral legal processes. The contribution lies not in rehearsing established positions but in demonstrating their application to contemporary legal crises: how can legal systems claim legitimacy when they cannot comprehend the narratives of those they govern? This article positions literary consciousness as the ethical prerequisite for any legal system aspiring to justice rather than mere order.
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