I have the delightful privilege each fall to teach a class called "Law and Literature." My hope, I tell my students the first day, is that they will come to appreciate the role literature plays in shaping well rounded counselors at law. The ability to hear a story, to tell a story, indeed to read a story, is useful in any helping profession, but paramount in a profession whose primary tool is language.

Most students are wary at the beginning, and I can’t blame them, for the separation of literature and law was pro∙claimed well∙nigh com∙plete one hundred sixteen years ago.

The divorce of law and literature seems in these latter days to be wellnigh complete, and one never hears that a professor of literature in our schools of polite learning refers his students to legal literature for examples of elegance or eloquence; yet historically it is probably true that no two branches are more closely united and interwoven. Indeed, it may not be too much to say that the earliest and most characteristic and original literature in all languages is the literature of law.

Nearly eighty years ago, Lord MacMillan remembered the literary past to lawyers attending the 1930 American Bar Association meeting.

Fortunately the law has always been on excellent terms with the Muses. You have only to read the biographies of our great judges and advocates of the past to realize how versed in letters most of them were, and what solace and inspiration they drew from that source.

Chief Justice Marshall himself, said MacMillan, had copied out every word of Pope's Essay on Man and committed his favorite passages to memory before he was 12 years old. Marshall, bought Mason's Poems about the same time as he acquired Blackstone's Commentaries and among his other early purchases were Chesterfield's Letters, the Life of Clarendon, Machiavelli's Works and translations of AEschines' Orations and Demosthenes on the Crown-a sufficiently varied intellectual diet. When he was 71 years of age he read the whole of Jane Austen's novels. . . .

We begin each semester by defining the terms law and literature. We brainstorm one term at a time; the students begin toss out concepts that I write on the board. There always seems to be an a∙ha! moment when the class begins to see similar concepts arise under both concepts "law" and "literature." Common are ideas such as "importance," "durability," "standing the test of time" "worthy" "substantial" "good" "worth knowing" "for all" and "universal." The idea of "fixed" as in "written" comes up, but we quickly loosen the term "literature" to include audio recordings and visual movies.

But as soon as class discussions veers away from the "fixed-written" tradition to the "oral-transient" tradition, someone inevitably mentions the oral traditions of many Native American People and how their customs and laws were passed through generations. Huffcut agrees. He tells us not only that law is the earliest and most characteristic and original literature in all languages, but that it is "not only literature but the highest form of literature, –poetry." Why poetry? Because, of all the knowledge of mankind which it is most essential for a people to preserve, the knowledge of their laws is of the first importance. [Where there is no writing, laws] must pass from generation to generation by verbal transmission. But the enormous burden to [remember] a great and growing body of law, and the danger of transmitting verbal errors which would work great mischief in the application of legal rules, suggest the reason why a rhythmic verse should be adopted as the vehicle for such transmission. Such a form aids the memory, and at the same time guards against a corrupt rendering of the laws. It is therefore naturally adopted by primitive peoples. . . .

So while my students may think they get to take it easy and watch My Cousin Vinny and Runaway Jury, and while most of them have read To Kill a MockingBird, it’s been too many years. So they get to read it again and mean it.

They get too, to see 12 Angry Men, and of course, A Man for All Seasons. Most students get their first taste of Kafka and wriggle in their seats at his amazingly short and exasperating single paragraph parable "Before the Law. They read Lincoln at Gettysburg. Then the students get to read, almost certainly for the first time, one of today’s great writers who also happens to wear a robe on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit—Judge Richard Posner.

Posner for example, calls Antony’s speech in Act III of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, "The apogee of forensic oratory in literature." Then he eloquently explains why. My students hear and read the cadence of Martin Luther King; they read short stories that make them wonder why they wind up rooting for the bad guy.

They read and think and listen to one another. And too soon, it is time to go. Like now, my editor tells me past deadline. I leave with one last quote from Guy Mannering by Sir Walter Scott.

But the library, into which he was shown by an elderly respectable looking man-servant, was a complete contrast to these unpromising appearances. It was a well-proportioned room, hung with a portrait or two of Scottish characters of eminence, by Jamieson, the Caledonian Vandyke, and surrounded with books, the best editions of the best authors, and, in particular, an admirable collection of classics.

"These," said Pleydell, "are my tools of trade. A lawyer without history or literature is a mechanic, a mere working mason; if he possesses some knowledge of these, he may venture to call himself an architect."