Book Cover

Law, Literature and Legal Counterfactuals

A Method of Contrastive Discourse Analysis Using the Example of Contemporary Literature

Alexandra Juster

Law and Visual Jurisprudence : 16 | Series Editors: Sarah Marusek · Anne Wagner

https://link.springer.com/book/9783032037916

Research Context

Building on the American law and literature movement, this work contributes to the emerging European interdisciplinary field. Supported by the German Collaborative Research Centre (SFB) 1385 'Law and Literature', this research develops a contrastive interdisciplinary method focusing on law in literature.

Methodological Innovation

Legal Counterfactuals: A novel analytical framework that systematically extracts legal discourse from literary texts and contrasts it with real-world legal texts to determine the degree of correspondence between diegetic and real law.

Theoretical Foundation

The research examines methodological concepts of interdisciplinarity and counterfactuality, alongside specific textual approaches including discourse analysis and hermeneutics. Common ground between legal and literary studies includes:

  • Written text as shared working basis
  • Hermeneutics as analytical tool
  • Discourse analysis methodology

Methodology Process

Extract
Legal discourse from literary texts
Contrast
With real-world legal texts
Determine
Degree of correspondence

International Scope

Comprehensive overview of heterogeneous research approaches across European jurisdictions:

  • Italy: Classical law and literature tradition
  • France: Droit et littérature movement
  • Belgium: Multilingual approaches
  • Germany: Recht und Literatur studies

Case Studies: Contemporary Literature

La décision (2022) by Karine Tuil
French anti-terror law
Sworn Virgin (2014) by Elvira Dones
Albanian Kanun customary law
Unorthodox (2012) by Deborah Feldman
Talmudic law
Repenti (2017) by Claude Chossat
Corsican feudal vendetta law
A Slap in the Face (2016) by Abbas Khider
German asylum law

Research Contribution

This work addresses underexplored areas of law in interdisciplinary research, providing a methodological foundation for the further development of the law and literature field through the systematic application of legal counterfactual analysis.