This seminar reflects on the relationship between law and literature, particularly on how literary forms and narratives interact with political and social legal orders. Julie Peters credits the “antidisciplinarity” of both law and literature as central to the movement that emerged in the 1980s. Bringing this conversation to the 21st century, this seminar seeks to bring fresh perspectives on this interdisciplinary approach by expanding its theoretical scope. Sub-fields like trauma studies have long reflected on the challenges and possibilities of representing and aestheticizing atrocity and suffering. Similarly, human rights and literary scholarship has revealed the limits of universalism by attending to the specific challenges of language, translation, and representation in normative discourses of human rights.

This seminar, then, asks: what new insights may we gain from bringing literary criticism to bear on the law? How can these intersections shed light on urgent global concerns like economic inequality, neoliberalism, carcerality, climate change, and dispossession? Is it possible to read law literarily and in doing so, to uncover hegemonic narrative and rhetorical strategies? 

Participants are encouraged to submit proposals that ask or respond to questions that include but are not limited to:

• Where and how do law and literature converge or diverge in their ideas of justice and ethics, and in their respective world-making capacities?
• How can attending to law and literature together open up new ways of reading and interpretation?
• What are some critical challenges that the interdiscipline must attend to?
• What aesthetic form does law take in literary production?
• What kinds of alternative narratives or structures do literatures of witnessing produce as opposed to legal witnessing?
• What literary and legal processes make up truths?
• Does popular culture lend a positive affect to the social relations of law?
• Does the interdiscipline of law and literature fall into statist modes of reading? Is there a way out?
• Who is the subject of literature and of law?
• How is the narrative voice of literature determined before law?

Reach out to Nimisha at nsinha1@binghamton.edu with any questions. Abstracts (under 1500 characters, roughly 250 words) must be submitted via the ACLA website by Oct 2, 2025.