The Southern California Interdisciplinary Law Review recently published an article entitled “Franz Kafka, Lawrence Joseph, and the Possibilities of Jurisprudential Literature.” The author, Patrick J. Glen, offers this conclusion about the two writers:
This Article… has offered a harmonious and complementary reading of two giants in the contemporary law and literature discourse, Franz Kafka and Lawrence Joseph. The work of these authors offer complementary perspectives of the legal system–Kafka’s from the point of view of the litigant, Joseph’s from within the system… Moving away from traditional conceptions of jurisprudence, Kafka and Joseph offer a realist, practical account of the nature and derivations of law in contemporary practice… Literary jurisprudence offers a better way to directly and truthfully address the nature of law in its twenty-first century manifestations. Moreover, the narrative form is likely to get one closer to the truth of legal experience than are the traditional approaches of academic jurisprudence… In this sense, literary jurisprudence, despite its fictional form, may offer a more realistic account of contemporary legal practice than academic writing, and thus provide a solid basis from which improvements in law could be proposed.
You can find the full article here.
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