The Lizzie Borden trial is mentioned prominently in this piece as a useful example of what can be done to inspire learning of the law. An excerpt of the article:<\/p>\n
Using Literature to Make Better Lawyers<\/p>\n
Denise Forster<\/p>\n
FOR YEARS, law professors have woven works of literature\u00e2\u20ac\u201dnovels, memoirs, short stories, essays\u00e2\u20ac\u201dinto classes and seminars to tell the stories of law. Using these works, professors and students dissect scenarios not otherwise encountered in traditional legal curricula. A survey of some of the LawSchool\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent courses follows.<\/p>\n
Literature as Gateway<\/p>\n
Anne Coughlin says it over and over\u00e2\u20ac\u201dthere are certain legal spaces where it\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s very hard to get information about what\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s taking place. To get into those legal spaces, she asserts, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153lawyers and law professors almost have to turn to narratives to understand how our system is functioning.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Coughlin, the O.M. Vicars Professor of Law and Barron F. Black Research Professor, takes her students inside the workings of a jury by reading Trial By Jury, a Princeton historian\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s first-person account of serving as jury foreman in a Manhattan trial. Literature can be a place to turn for empirical data, according to Coughlin, who concedes it may be only anecdotal. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re bringing into the Law School a text that\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unconventional in the sense that it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t purport to be doctrinal, it doesn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t purport to be written from the perspective of a legal academic or a legal practitioner. But it does fill in the blanks,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d she said.<\/p>\n
A prior culture\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s norms are the blanks that literature can fill. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We have an intuition that women in the 19th century were harmed by extramarital affairs. Well, how do we know that? There aren\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t a whole lot of cases on the books. Most of the facts get handled out of court privately and don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t become law cases. To the extent that there are cases on the books about sex, whether it be consensual or rape, the cases don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t tell you very much because judges won\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t write about it. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s indecent. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s dirty. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s unmentionable, so we don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t know a whole lot about it. We certainly don\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t have the young woman\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s perspective. She\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s completely lost as a character, so sometimes the best way is to turn back to fiction. You have to be cautious; this is literature and we must be very careful in our generalizations. But for us to understand how they defined rape or how they defined criminal conversation, we need to know more of the facts.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
Coughlin co-taught a course, Trials of the Century: Literary and Legal Representations of Sensational Criminal Trials, with former Law School Professor Jennifer Mnookin, studying essays, trial transcripts, memoirs, short stories, films, and novels, and it worked: the class dazzled professors and students alike.<\/p>\n
\u00e2\u20ac\u0153We took sensational trials that have become part of our cultural repertoire, our cultural canon. We asked ourselves, what is the great lawyer\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s work product? We were interested in the cases that changed legal culture and popular culture, so we used cases that themselves are legends in their own time or have become the basis for movies, novels, and plays.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
The class read portions of transcripts of the Lizzie Borden trial and the lawyers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 arguments, watched a reenactment done by the Stanford Law School, and read a short story about Lizzie. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153It was absolutely eye-opening,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Coughlin, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153just riveting in terms of giving you a sense of that hot August day when somebody\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwe think it was Lizzie Borden, but it was never proved\u00e2\u20ac\u201dwent and killed Mr. and Mrs. Borden. We were looking for a three-dimensional understanding of that trial in its time and place and its meaning for subsequent generations.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
The class did the same thing with the Oscar Wilde case, looking at the connection between law and literature. Perhaps the most popular playwright on the planet at that time, Wilde brought a criminal libel action based on his lover\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s father\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s accusation that Wilde was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153posing as a sodomite.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d For the purposes of the class, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153it was just too good to be true,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Coughlin. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Wilde takes the stand as a playwright who, of course, writes dialogue; some portions of the transcript of the Oscar Wilde trial read like a play. He is so witty and so funny, but then reality sets in. He can\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t control it. He\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s no longer the playwright. The lawyers are in control and you can suddenly see Wilde\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s story starting to disintegrate as his case falls apart, revealing the truth: not only was he in fact posing as a sodomite, he was having sex with many young men.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n
The class went on to cover the trial of Socrates, and the Scottsboro boys, and was intrigued by the parallels of the contemporary significance of those trials. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Look at Scopes, the evolution question. It\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right back on the table. Look at Oscar Wilde\u00e2\u20ac\u201dgay marriage, gay sex. Right back on the table,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d says Coughlin. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153We all learned so much\u00e2\u20ac\u201dand it was a huge help for practical lawyering. We read a lot of lawyers\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 works and studied them together systematically and the ways in which they get represented and readdressed. And we read some of the greatest closing arguments of all time. The words of Clarence Darrow just blow you away. These are students who want to litigate and get up on their feet and they have to learn how to perform. Of course, they\u00e2\u20ac\u2122re not all going to be trying the trials of the century, but some of them will. These are brilliant students and I just never saw anything like it.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
An interesting article appeared on the Univeristy of Virginia Law School site that is titled “Using Literature to Make Better Lawyers.” The Lizzie Borden trial is mentioned prominently in this piece as a useful example of what can be done to inspire learning of the law. An excerpt of the article: Using Literature to Make […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,7,15,5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-725","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-6-degrees-of-separation","category-borden-buzz","category-case-related","category-on-the-web"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=725"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/725\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=725"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=725"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lizzieandrewborden.com\/mondolizzie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=725"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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