Doctorow and Kushner And How the Artist Sees the Law
One question to consider before our event on January 19, 2006, is the way in which the artist sees the law, and the legal system, in ways that are different from lawyers, judges, and law professors. Clearly the artist, from Sophocles to Shakespeare, and to Dickens to Dostoyevsky, are concerned with other values, more moral in nature, than the ordinary concerns of those who practice the law, and are the guardians of the law. What are artists looking at that judges and lawyers miss all of the time?
January 23rd, 2006 at 11:51 pm
Says:
Do artists really see the legal system differently than those in the field of jurisprudence? After all, many in the legal profession are avid readers of fiction, and some are also authors of fiction. Perhaps the difference lies more in their respective missions than in their vision. The legal profession deals with moral issues in the context of a specific confluence of events and the applicable societal agreements on laws that may govern the circumstances. Legislation is time and culture dependent. Writers of fiction create imaginary circumstances, that may be partially based on non-fictional events, and seek to explore the principles underlying moral values. The exploration can involve juxtapositions of plot, character, and environment, yielding a possibly transcendent sense of justice that may challenge the bounds of the current legal framework. In sum, the legal profession deals with what is fact and bases a notion of justice on known and supposed actual events in the context of existing local laws. Fiction deals with what could be and in so doing may modify our principles of morality, independent of time and place.
February 2nd, 2006 at 10:34 pm
Says:
I’m not sure it’s fair to characterize what artists see in the law as what “judges and lawyers miss all the time.” Who’s to say that a dramatized depiction of the law is something that judges and lawyers fail to recognize or strive for, or somehow superior to the reality of what judges and lawyers actually encounter? If what artists see in the law is a potential for justice and moral balance, then surely that correlates to how at least some segment of the legal population aims to practice. Perhaps not every real-life murder trial concludes with the sense of justice with which a great artist may later want to depict it, but neither does every visit to the hospital emergency room conclude with a life-changing encounter with a healing genius, nor every school-day conclude with a tremendous sense of enlightenment bestowed by a profound professor. Maybe reality is not always as romantic as an artist may depict it, but that doesn’t make it any less valid or worthwhile.