Cannons and Codes: Law, Literature, and America's Wars

by Alison L. LaCroix (editor), Jonathan S. Masur (Editor), Martha C. Nussbaum (Editor)

It can be said that western literature begins with a war story, the Iliad; and that this is true too of many non-Western literary traditions, such as the Mahabharata. And yet, though a profoundly human subject, war often appears to be by definition outside the realm of structures such as law and literature. When we speak of war, we often understand it as incapable of being rendered into rules or words. Lawyers struggle to fit the horrors of the battlefield, the torture chamber, or the makeshift hospital filled with wounded and dying civilians into the framework of legible rules and shared understandings that law assumes and demands. In the West's centuries-long effort to construct a formal law of war, the imperative has been to acknowledge the inhumanity of war while resisting the conclusion that it need therefore be without law. Writers, in contrast, seek to find the human within war--an individual story, perhaps even a moment of comprehension. Law and literature might in this way be said to share imperialist tendencies where war is toward extending their dominion to contain what might be uncontainable.

Law, literature, and war are thus all profoundly connected--and it is this connection this edited volume aims to explore, assembling essays by preeminent scholars to discuss the ways in which literary works can shed light on legal thinking about war, and how a deep understanding of law can lead to interpretive insights on literary works. Some of the contributions concern the lives of soldiers; others focus on civilians living in war zones who are caught up in the conflict; still others address themselves to the home front, far from the theatre of war. By collecting such diverse perspectives, the volume aims to illuminate how literature has reflected the totalizing nature of war and the ways in which it distorts law across domains.

320 pages, ebook

Published April 2, 2021

About the author

Alison LaCroix is Professor of Law and Ludwig and Hilde Wolf Teaching Scholar at The University of Chicago Law School.

Alison LaCroix received her BA summa cum laude in history from Yale University in 1996 and her JD from Yale Law School in 1999. She received her PhD in history from Harvard University in 2007, after earning an AM in history from Harvard in 2003. While in law school, Ms. LaCroix served as Essays Editor of the Yale Law Journal. From 1999 to 2001, she practiced in the litigation department at Debevoise & Plimpton in New York. Before joining the University of Chicago faculty, she was a Samuel I. Golieb Fellow in Legal History at New York University School of Law.

Ms. LaCroix's teaching and research interests include legal history, federalism, constitutional law, privacy, and federal jurisdiction and procedure.