AN HONEST INTERDISCIPLINARITY?

The careful and perhaps even the not so careful reader will have noticed my use of quotation marks around the words ‘‘interdisciplinary” and ‘‘inter­disciplinarity” in the preceding section Is there some true or honest form of interdisciplinary endeavor that could evade those cynical inverted commas? Answering this question is much harder than demonstrating the ways in which much of the current law and literature work seems to rely on sleight of hand

As a start, let me suggest one possible source of the problem On the one hand lawyers and legal academics are as invested as any other professionals (including by the way English and Comparative Literature professors) in the idea that their field is indeed a distinct discipline one with specialized rules and conventions This leads to an emphasis on the technical aspects of law and particularly on legal doctrine.¹⁶ For those taking this view there is something special, and quite different, about ‘‘professional” fields Thus Jack Balkin writes: ‘‘Legal knowledge is professional knowledge The study of law is part of a professional practice a set of professional skills that are taught to new professionals in professional schools” (Balkin 1996, ₽· 966)

At the same time however even those who emphasize law’s distinct disciplinary identity do not want to think of this discipline as totally rule-oriented and technical, as completely excluding emotion morality, concern for context and so forth Yet the more these qualities are permitted ‘‘inside” law’s domain the less distinct law looks This is bad for those seeking to found their identity on law but also for those who are now making their careers by trying to define from outside law - from compar­ative literature and English departments for example - what the domain of law is In the end thinking about where the boundary lines lie who is drawing them and for what reason is hard So it simply is not being done.

Very intuitively interdisciplinarity might be thought of as simply the blending of two (or more) disciplines Before we could effectuate such a blending or evaluate its effects we would have to define what each discipline is But we exist in an intellectual environment in which the entire concept of a ‘‘discipline’’ is highly contested; all of us contributing papers to this col­lection are well enough versed in social construction theory to understand how problematic it is to posit a ‘‘real’’ legal (or literary) realm We construct law’s (and literature’s) domain for our own purposes and the forms of interdisciplinarity in which we engage will reflect our agendas as well.

NOTES

1. The first edition entitled Law and literature: A misunderstood relation, was published in 1988. Surveys reveal that Posner’s book is assigned more often than any other in law and literature courses Resnik (1999, p. 721).

2. Some of the same questions arise with respect to other “law-ands” such as law and history or law and philosophy See Baron (1999a) Only law and economics have gained wide mainstream acceptance within the legal academy Why this is so is a question well beyond the scope of this essay.

3 See the intriguingly titled Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a critical theory of cyberspace, by Michael Froomkin. Froomkin (2003, p. 749).

4 For examples of such approaches see Hart and Sacks (Tentative Edition 1958); Cappalli (1997).

5 Among the most influential works in this vein are Cover (1983, p 4) and White (1985).

6. This is most explicitly James Boyd White's view.

7. For examples see the essays collected in Levinson and Mailloux (1988)

8 For further elaboration of this point see Baron (1999a b)

9 This heading owes something to Scalia (1989)

10 In a recent article Douglas Vick suggests that “doctrinalism” is the ‘‘shared core that defines the legal discipline.” (Vick 2004, p. 188) Relatedly some have suggested that the distinctive methodology of legal scholarship is the framing of prescriptive recommendations to legal decision makers (Rubin 1997)

11. This is to some extent the position of Judge Posner See Posner (1998)

12 On the development of the Langdellian ideal see Tomlins (2000) Ferguson (1984) _and St_evens (1983).

13 This depiction is meant to be a caricature For example that at least when read uncharitably come close see Nussbaum (1995, pp. 79-121) and Heald (1998, p. 55)

14On law-and-science see Caudill (2002-2003).

15 In this thin view of “interdisciplinarity” lawyers who study works of literature would be doing “interdisciplinary” work simply by virtue of the fact that they focus on something other than cases statutes contracts or other texts conventionally considered “legal.”

16 As Vick (2004) puts it: ‘‘The grip that doctrinal thinking has on the discipline of law is tighter than is often imagined'' (p. 191).

17Consider in this regard Christopher Tomlins' observation (2000) that:

Law has shown less interest in encounters that intrude methodologically or ideologically upon its deployment of determinative power and authority for here its disciplinary self­sufficiency is clearer its methodological capacities more secure its conversation more conveniently closed Law’s future disciplinary encounters might simply reproduce this pattern in which case the agenda would continue to be law's as it has in the past...(p. 967).

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