Legal Commentary

I skimmed an interesting article, An Essay on Franz Kafka, Lawrence Joseph, and the Possibilities of Jurisprudential Literature, by Patrick Glen (HT Larry Solum), a lawyer in the DOJ Civil Division, and an adjunct professor at Georgetown with quite an impressive publication record.  I never got into Kafka, nor was I familiar with the work of the novelist and law prof (a fellow Detroiter), Lawrence Joseph.  The hook, for me, was this sentence in the abstract:  "The importance of perspective rests with the fact that although law might constitute an objective system, its experience is inevitably subjective."  Or from the essay:  "In essence, the law of the academy is the law of Posner?a system of rules that, by definition, excludes malevolent whimsy, arbitrariness, capriciousness. Law is known and need only be applied to certain factual situations. The fact that reasonable minds may differ on that application does not undercut law?s objective pretensions."

I'm a long way from being a Crit, but there's a fundamental insight in the application of narrative to the legal process, which is that it's always a subjective take.  I happen to think that it's a subjective take on an objective world (pace Crits, I think, in the sense that I don't think truth is always at odds with power), something I've written about from time to time.  This is an thoughtful exploration of that idea.