Law in Art/Law as Art

I’ve taught in law schools for 13 years. Before that I practiced in New York City for over 11. What I’ve largely found is that lawyers have little use for law professors, and law professors have little use for lawyers.  Where I am this year, the University of Detroit Mercy Law School, is an exception to this rule, and a rare one.  The far more common, if strange, disconnect between the academic world and the world of practice is illustrated by the academic field known as “Law and LIterature.”  Wikipedia accurately describes Law and Literature as both the study of law in literature and of the literary characteristics of legal writing.:

The law and literature movement focuses on the interdisciplinary connection between law and literature. Believed to have originally begun as a subcategory of jurisprudence, the movement encompasses the complementary ideas of law in literature and law as literature.

The problem, as Daniel J. Kornstein, a writer and a lawyer, is that the law and literature movement has had no impact on the practice of law:

The greatest shortcoming in Law and LIterature to date has been its failure to reach and engage the practicing lawyer. For the most part, Law and Literature has remained firmly entrenched in legal academia, its realm of origin. The shirtsleeve lawyer is essentially untouched.

I have from the start intended for this blog in large part to remedy this lack of connection between literature, and other arts, and the practice of law. Just as the Law and Literature movement examines both law in literature and law as literature, I try to focus on law in creative endeavors and law as a creative endeavor. I suppose part of what drives me to do so is that I have taught primarily first year law students, and they, like most people, have given very little thought to the art they have encountered and only begin under my watch to understand that, perhaps primarily, I am training them to be artists, not technocrats.