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IrisAikateriniFrangouSecondEssay 3 - 17 Apr 2021 - Main.IrisAikateriniFrangou
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It is strongly recommended that you include your outline in the body of your essay by using the outline as section titles. The headings below are there to remind you how section and subsection titles are formatted. | |
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< | LITERATURE AND THE LAW: LITERATURE AS CONDUCIVE TO A MORE ACCURATE UNDERSTANDING OF THE LAW | >
> | Literature and the Law: Literature as Conducive to a More Accurate Understanding of the Law | | | -- By IrisAikateriniFrangou - 14 Apr 2021 | | | I suggest that literature has the potential to provide a more complete account of the law than the law itself (by which I refer to American legal academia, confined largely to legal scholarship and judicial opinions). Kafka and Joseph dramatize the gap between law in theory and law in practice by emphasizing the relational aspect of the law in its application. By relying on narration, they demonstrate the power of literature to portray all aspects of the law through literature's conveyance of the multiplicity of truth.
Kafka’s “The Trial”: The Defendant’s Perspective | |
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< | The Trial features “Josef K.”, a cashier who is arrested by two nameless agents from an indeterminate agency for an indeterminate crime, of which he is eventually executed. The entire experience is narrated through the perspective of the agitated defendant, entrapped by a legal system to which he nevertheless remains a foreigner: the operation of the law is never explained to him, yet it dominates his life with brute force. It is this alienating effect of the “outsider status” that renders the law (and eventually life) absurd for K. Regardless of whether the law also serves as a metaphor for the alienation of man in modern society, the law itself is definitively present in Kafka’s writing. The law objectively exists as is evidenced by the legal process of K’s trial. Rather, it is K’s experience of the law that makes it seem hidden because it is inexplicable to him. The only definitive revelation is by Titorelli (the court’s painter), from whom K learns that no final acquittal is possible but even then, K never understands how the law arrives at this outcome – it is Titorelli’s empirical (not legal) understanding of the law that is communicated. Hence, the law is objectively present in Kafka’s work and though this definitiveness is necessarily recognized by the Defendant (through the absolute impact the law has on his life), the law nevertheless “feels” absurd because its mechanisms are foreign to him. There is a gap between the law’s objectiveness (definitive presence) and the defendant’s experience of the law (incoherence due to its inexplicability). | >
> | The Trial features “Josef K.”, a cashier who is arrested by two nameless agents from an indeterminate agency for an indeterminate crime, of which he is eventually executed. The entire experience is narrated through the perspective of the agitated defendant, entrapped by a legal system to which he nevertheless remains a foreigner: the operation of the law is never explained to him, yet it dominates his life with brute force. It is this alienating effect of the “outsider status” that renders the law (and eventually life) absurd for K. Regardless of whether the law also serves as a metaphor for the alienation of man in modern society, the law itself is definitively present in Kafka’s writing. The law objectively exists as is evidenced by the legal process of K.'s trial. Rather, it is K.'s experience of the law that makes it seem hidden because it is inexplicable to him. The only definitive revelation is by Titorelli (the court’s painter), from whom K. learns that no final acquittal is possible but even then, K. never understands how the law arrives at this outcome – it is Titorelli’s empirical (not legal) understanding of the law that is communicated. Hence, the law is objectively present in Kafka’s work and though this definitiveness is necessarily recognized by the defendant (through the absolute impact the law has on his life), the law nevertheless “feels” absurd because its mechanisms are foreign to him. There is a gap between the law’s objectiveness (definitive presence) and the defendant’s experience of the law (incoherence due to its inexplicability). | | | Joseph’s “Lawyerland”: The Lawyer’s Perspective
In the work’s first chapter, Robinson narrates his successful defense (outside of court) of a young man, who attempts to rob a residence that unbeknownst to him belongs to the AUSA. The AUSA then informs his brother-in-law (the ADA) who assigns the case to a leading female prosecutor. Robinson threatens to use his information of those relationships to exculpate the young man. His anecdote, like K.’s, illustrates the distance between the law in theory and the law in practice. However, the change in perspective (from defendant to lawyer) also imbues this distance with new meaning. Here, the law theoretically relies on the neutral application of its rules, but in practice it is social relationships that are the most significant determinant of legal outcomes. More than just convergence (in the depiction of the law as subjective i.e. perspective-dependent), Lawyerland further informs Kafka’s view of the law. The law in Lawyerland is largely relational – it is based on social relationships that the lawyer strategically navigates. In its self-proclamation as being “truthful”, Lawyerland intimates that such relationality is part of the law’s reality (not just Robinson’s) – a view which traditional legal thought does not deny but largely ignores. The theoretical - practical divergence in the law is not absurd to Robinson (the way it is to K.); his suffering instead, derives from the very understanding of that system as one that is disjointed in practice from its theoretical lucidity. |
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