Speaking of why we need the humanities, I accidentally stumbled across this post a couple weeks back.
Now,
granted, I probably should have been a medievalist instead of a
litigator or a law professor or whatever I’m going to be–in which case
I would have a sturdier foundation of knowledge for making this claim,
but still, I feel confident in asserting that no literarian would make
the mistake of forgetting that everything is narrative. Consequently,
no literarian–seriously, feel free to go get Michael
Bérubé from the shadows of Crooked Timber to correct me if I’m wrong
about how the English/literature professors feel about this–would make
the mistake that Professor Henderson makes in his blog post (linked
above) and article about which the post is… about.
Essentially, he
argues that law and literature has not "worked" because, if literature
helped judges to understand the human condition, to be more empathetic,
then federal judges would cite to fiction in their judicial opinions at
rates greater than whatever the current (very small) rates are.
On
its face, this proposition is asinine. No one who "took a fabulous
class called ‘Law & Literature’ from Professor Nussbaum" at the
University of Chicago should make this error. Putting aside
professional norms (and this is an important and powerful factor), and
putting aside also the crucial fact that what judges should cite as
legal authority is legal authority (and incidentally, law is
the only field in which it is not fallacious to cite the fact that
something has been said as proof of the thing that has been said), this
is absurd purely in terms of what it would look like. "As I
was saying, in my consideration of Mr. Boumediene’s habeas case from
Gitmo, I have read the briefs in light of the inarticulable lessons I
have learned, and experiences that have changed me, from reading
Tolkien’s The Hobbit, Eliot’s The Waste Land, Chaucer’s discussion of fame, and Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, and consequently, I think that torture is bad." Ha!
That
is, the argument is that if literature makes people more humane, and
more humane people make better judicial decisions, then we can know
that judges who read literature (ignoring declining reading rates in
this country) are not making better decisions because they are not
referencing Shakespeare in their opinions on the business judgment rule
and Article III standing. (One notable exception would evidently be
Chief Justice Roberts, a truly humane person if I have ever seen one,
because of his flatly idiotic use of that stupid Dylan lyric in
whatever recent case it was that made people on such thoughtful law
blogs as PrawfsBlawg and the Volokh Conspiracy take notice.)
Anyhow,
I promised myself I wouldn’t rant, or go off on Todd Henderson, with whom I am otherwise unfamiliar. I may have broken that promise. (See above.) BUT
the point I wanted to make about literature, narrative, and if we
stretch it broadly enough, the humanities, is that the need for
statistics can be terribly misused when we forget that numbers do not
tell stories until we infuse them with meaning, or tell stories with them.
Technically,
Professor Henderson’s statistics tell us precisely one thing: the
number of hits he got when he plugged in whatever search terms he used
in the Westlaw searches that he ran.
The problem is that we’re
at a point where narrative is mistrusted. We don’t want people to tell
us stories, we just want facts. So we look for numbers and we model
our scholarship on the social sciences and we get unvarnished
truth–which we then promptly turn into a lie because we need that
story to take meaning from our empty true facts, only we don’t realize
that we’re making up a story so we do it badly and our interpretation
is that "the law and literature movement" has not "worked" because of
the results of an empirical study of the opinion-writing practices of federal
judges.
We know that Yorick was a fellow of infinite jest. But what exactly was his boffo material? Did he slay them with borscht-belt one-liners, or did he stick to observational humor — Seinfeld-like riffs on the miseries of Danish weather? Alas, we cannot know. But it seems fairly certain that even melancholy Danes prized a choice punch line, like the Romans and the Greeks before them.
Accidental Blogger 
