SMNR: Literature and the Law

• Semester: Fall 2026
• Course ID: 397S
• Credit Hours: 3
• Unique: 31995

Registration Status: Waitlisted

Description

Herman Melville

This seminar examines the work of Herman Melville against the institutional, doctrinal, and jurisprudential landscape of nineteenth-century United States law. Melville wrote during a period of rapid industrialization, expanding federal authority, transformation of commercial and maritime law, and intensifying sectional conflict over slavery and sovereignty—a period in which the meaning of law itself was deeply contested. His fiction does not merely reflect this landscape; it probes it, often with greater analytic precision and moral candor than the legal texts of his day. His work persistently engages questions of authority, obligation, personhood, property, contract, and judgment while subjecting those categories to pressures that formal legal reasoning tends to suppress or displace.

We will read major works including "Bartleby, the Scrivener," "Benito Cereno," "Billy Budd," The Confidence-Man, selections from Moby-Dick, and selected poems, alongside contemporaneous judicial opinions, statutes, and legal treatises addressing admiralty, commercial law, master–servant relations, slavery, martial law, and the emerging bureaucratic state. Particular attention will be given to the formal and rhetorical affinities between literary narrative and legal reasoning: evidentiary uncertainty, interpretive authority, jurisdictional conflict, and the problem of equitable judgment.

In addition to primary legal materials, we will engage foundational and contemporary law-and-literature scholarship across its main methodological strands—"law in literature," "law as literature," and more recent work attentive to race, gender, and institutional violence. Scholars including Robert Cover, Brook Thomas, Gregg Crane, and Wai Chee Dimock will anchor our theoretical discussions. The goal is not merely to illuminate Melville through law, or law through Melville, but to use the encounter between them to think more carefully about interpretation, authority, judgment, and the limits of institutional reason.

The seminar emphasizes close reading of literary and legal texts alike and sustained discussion. It is designed for students interested in American jurisprudence, literature, and legal history, and interdisciplinary legal theory. Requirements include active participation and a substantial research paper.