ABOUT US

BEGINNINGS

The Rutgers/Newark Connection. In 1978, a few law professors and students at Rutgers/Newark Law School devised the idea of establishing an “Institute” to bring the separate disciplines of law and literature into dialogue among scholars, dramatists, lawyers, and poets to discuss how a new field (“Law and Literature”) might be pursued.

These innovators were Prof. J. Allen Smith, Prof. David Haber, and their student, Loree “Rip” Collins, who respectively became the Founding Chair, Vice President, and Treasurer of a new organization to fulfill its aims. They called it the “Law and Humanities Institute” (or “LHI”). They invited Richard Weisberg of the Cardozo Law School of Yeshiva University, itself an innovative new institution, to become LHI’s first President, as he brought interdisciplinary expertise having recently taught French and Comparative Literature at the University of Chicago before resigning to teach and practice law. Katherine Roome, a lawyer at McGraw Hill, agreed to take on the job of Secretary, a post she held with distinction for LHI over ten years.

Rip Collins used his years of pre-law school experience working for the W.R. Grace corporation to file for not-for-profit status and make LHI a 501 (c) (3) charity devoted to the humanization of law, the strengthening of literary criticism, the prevention of censorship of the creative imagination, and the sponsorship of symposia in the rapidly growing field of “Law and Literature.” By 1979, LHI was incorporated by the federal government as a “public foundation” in the state of NJ. After many years of faithful service, Collins turned over the post of Treasurer to Prof. Judith Koffler of Pace Law School.

THE FOUNDING BOARD

The founding board was a group of interdisciplinary and highly distinguished scholars, judges, and practitioners, and creative artists, including Geoffrey Hartman (Yale), Irving Younger (Cornell), Robert Cover (Yale), James Boyd White (Michigan), Barrie Stavis (an American playwright whose works on legal dilemmas in US history were widely acclaimed), Jay Wishingrad (a novelist and legal practitioner), George M. Williams, Jr. (a linguist and prominent NY corporate lawyer whose offices he generously offered for many board meetings, Milner Ball (Georgia), Christine Corcos (LSU Law School), Susan Tiefenbrun’s (TJSL), Daniel Solove (GWU Law School), Robin West (Georgetown Law School) and Lawrence Joseph (St. John’s Law School). In short order, LHI’s work became widely known and attracted to the Board notable individuals including Stanley Fish of Duke and UIC; Peter Brooks of Yale and Princeton; the Hollywood film writers Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee (“Auntie Mame”, “Inherit the Wind”, “First Monday in October”), Edward Bloustein (a President of Rutgers University and a first amendment scholar); Jean-Pierre Barricelli (UC Riverside, who – with Weisberg – had authored an early and still authoritative chapter for the Modern Language Association [“MLA”] on Law and Literature); Ephraim London, a renowned NY lawyer who had fought many battles against censorship and in his spare time wrote a two volume anthology called The Law In Literature and The Law As Literature; David A.J. Richards (NYU Law School), Kenneth McCallion, Esq, a distinguished plaintiff’s lawyer in high profile human rights related cases and an author in his own right; Ekow Yankah of University of Michigan Law School, a superb legal philosopher and tireless human rights lawyer; and Daniel Kornstein, whose wide-ranging practice in NYC included libel and censorship cases and whose work was written up (as had Weisberg’s) in journals such as the NY Times and the New Yorker.

AN EARLY ARTICULATION OF LHI’S MISSION

The organization’s second President, the late Danie Tritter (himself a fine writer about Dickens), capably authored one approach to describing LHI’s mission as part of a detailed grant application in 1985.

“LHI monitors both the social impact of the law and its interpretation and conducts ongoing evaluation of the state of legal education. Since its founding in 1979, LHI has addressed four major areas of research and activity: 1. law as a social institution depicted in fiction, with pathbreaking conferences and articles providing new readings of law-imbued stories such as The Oresteia, Njal’s Saga, The Merchant Of Venice, Billy Budd, Crime And Punishment, The Stranger, The Fall, The Trial, The Bluest Eye, “A Jury Of Her Peers”, The Book Of Daniel, etc; 2. Human rights and free expression; 3. Hermeneutics: interpretive methods applicable to the Constitution and to the understanding of literary and Biblical texts; and 4. Curricular innovation and expansion.”

AN EARLY APPROACH TO PARTICIPATION
THROUGH MEMBERSHIP

From the outset, LHI brought in members from all over the country and indeed the world. The membership sources expanded as LHI grew from a base of some 300 names of those in attendance in the late 1970’s at “special sessions” of the MLA and concurrently the American Association of Law Schools (AALS). Members paid dues averaging $25 annually. Other sources of income for LHI’s quickly expanding work came from private donors and occasionally government grants, such as the NJ Law Youth and Citizenship grants over several years to encourage the development for high school English teachers of law-related readings and curricula. Membership events were held all across the U.S., in local chapters from San Francisco to Washington D.C. and from Los Angeles to Philadelphia to New York City.

THE EARLY COOPERATION OF LHI
AND THE CARDOZO LAW SCHOOL

Much of the work of LHI developed in sync with the faculty and students of the Cardozo Law School under its entrepreneurial 1980’s dean, Monroe Price. A still-extant iteration of this is the “Floersheimer/LHI fellowship program” at Cardozo, which each year locates one or two rising 1-Ls with enriched backgrounds in the humanities to receive a grant during their three years in the JD program. Their main duty is to work on the journal, Cardozo Studies In Law And Literature, which was founded at Cardozo and with many of the new journal’s board of editors concurrently serving on the LHI Board. Now known as Law and Literature, the peer-reviewed journal is into its fourth decade of publication. Its current managing editor is LHI Governor Marco Wan of the literature department at the University of Hong Kong.

IDENTIFYING AN INTERNATIONAL
INTERDISCIPLINARY COMMUNITY

In order to establish a “community” linking the two enterprises, the early LHI Board used its networking to marry two areas of narrative thought– law and literature– that had for far too long been dissociated, although “nothing is new under the sun,” and individuals such as Cicero, Dean John Wigmore and Judge Benjamin N. Cardozo had unified these fields every time they merely spoke or wrote. Our late Governor Robert Cover would add here such was the case with biblical lawgivers including Moses and the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah. The work of amassing hundreds of like-minded people was instantly successful. Using the MLA and AALS connections well into the 1980’s, and developing lists out of conferences, books, articles, and international events, LHI took on an institutional identity which had been credited to recent scholars (e.g. Professor Brook Thomas of the English Department at UC Irvine) as founding the “Law and Literature movement” itself.

Into the 80's and 90's

Somewhat on a shoestring, LHI managed to innovate and become increasingly known through the following:

Annual symposia, typically co-sponsored with a college, university, or international organization such as the Australian Law and Literature Association. The proceedings of these symposia were often published in Cardozo Studies In Law And Literature or in such journals as Hartford Studies In Literature, UCLA Berkeley Law Review, Cardozo Law Review, Rutgers Law Review, University of Georgia Law Review, etc.
The filing of Amicus Briefs. LHI has filed amicus briefs advocating against the use of the electric chair as a means of execution in Bryan V. Moore; protecting magazines from financial backlash for publishing articles which are unsavory for celebrities in Hustler Magazine V. Falwell; and protecting explicit photographers from censorship in Massachusetts V. Oaks and in Stephen A. Knox V. Usa.
Developing and amassing Law and Literature curricula and bibliographies. Useful on all levels of education from 7-12 to college, law schools and Ph.D. Programs. These curricula and bibliographies will eventually be posted on this website.
Salons. Collegial gatherings of members for discussion, debate, and camaraderie.
The establishment of LHI’s newsletter The Mediator. Vol. 1#1 through vol 12#2 reported on all areas of LHI’s work. All the newsletters, ably edited with the assistance of LHI Governor, Professor Michael Pantazakos and many assistants, are available here.
An increasing advocacy focus on Human Rights law and educating the public about the stories of the struggle for human rights, with a strong sub-theme as time went on of legal developments connected to the Holocaust in Hitler’s Europe.

Into the 21st Century

A financial Breakthrough - In 2003 and then again fifteen years later, LHI was awarded grants connected to litigation in the EDNY successfully brought by Holocaust survivors and their heirs against wrongdoers in Vichy France. The federal court judge overseeing these cases, Sterling Johnson, as well as defense counsel Floyd Abrams, all the plaintiff class (once they had been restituted) and their lawyers, agreed that due to its established record and desire to humanize the law and make more fair, LHI was a worthy recipient of these funds.

The endowment for the first time assisted LHI to bring financial stability to its work and to make LHI a significant financial contributor to conferences and publications as well as to continue its traditional role of supplying the scholarly and creative fire-power to events, lectures, book chapters, and the expansion of Law and Literature studies to the UK, Italy, the Netherlands, France, Germany, Spain, China, Australia, and Brazil among many such venues.

LHI’S MISSION MOVING FORWARD

In what Nietzsche famously called the “eternal recurrence,” some of what lies ahead for LHI doubles back on its early experience. We aim to:

Reestablish memberships on all levels and in all workable localities and continue to enrich contacts already in place with international law and literature. communities in Europe, South America, Australia, Eurasia, and China, and enlarge the scope of these activities.
Extend our charge to remember human rights catastrophes and track the pronouncements of judges and authoritative writers who (as Melville masterfully showed in Billy Budd) don’t always demonstrate sound reasoning in their official declarations about fraught subjects.
Work with 7-12 educators on developing secondary school approaches to the use of fiction in teaching about law.
Encourage and support the work of a new generation of active scholars, teachers, practitioners, writers, public intellectuals, advocates and artists who work in our interdisciplinary areas.
Monitor and respond to threats to US Democracy, especially relating to free speech, artificial intelligence, and the baleful increase in domestic and worldwide antisemitism and other forms of hate, a task connected to our historical mission concerning human rights.

Our mission continues along these lines well into the fourth decade of our work and we welcome your support.

Much of the work of LHI developed in sync with the faculty and students at the Cardozo Law School as well as at Rutgers Newark. Eventually, strongly influenced by LHI Governors, a new journal was founded at Cardozo, called CARDOZO STUDIES IN LAW AND LITERATURE, which is now into its fourth decade of continuous, peer-reviewed commentary and creative writing in the interdisciplinary field.

OUTREACH in order to establish a “community” linking the two enterprises was instantly successful, Using the MLA and AALS connections well into the 1980’s, LHI took on the entrepreneurial role of crossing the divide that had kept like-minded scholars and creative spirits separate from each other for too long.

BRIEF HISTORY AND MISSION

Mission Statement Jan 1980

Mission Statement Feb 1980

Since its inception some 45 years ago, the Law & Humanities Institute ("LHI") has been dedicated both to humane contributions to our legal system and to the strengthening of the influence of fictional stories to a more richly improved treatment of people.

LHI's mission of creating an identity between legal and fictional narrative leads to a better world in multiple ways. We monitor legal censorship of imaginative expression and file amicus briefs where we see threats to the individual writer or artist. We also are asked to file briefs in cases where novels provide cautionary messages on such practices as capital punishment, say accomplished by cruel and inhuman means such as electrocution. We sponsor conferences on the interrelation of law and stories, often co-organizing events about such seminal stories as BILLY BUDD SAILOR or THE MERCHANT OF VENICE with prominent institutions both at home and abroad. These events bring people of different views together and usually result in publications, sometimes in the journal LAW AND LITERATURE, which since it founding around the same time as LHI under the name CARDOZO STUDIES IN LAW AND LITERATURE has been nurtured by LHI's Board and members.

Our history has been memorialized not only in our many publications but also in our newsletter, THE MEDIATOR, whose dozen or so years of existence are available on this website, and we have plans to continue such scholarship into the future.

LHI has been active around the country and has formed partnerships in Europe, China, South America, and Australia. We are foundationally committed to keeping an eye on such baleful developments as the rise of antisemitism and other forms of hate. We received a generous grant that supports all our work in human rights and hate- avoidance, as well as our general focus on law and stories as co-equal forms of narrative authority.

Our mission continues along these lines well into the fourth decade of our work. We welcome into our growing ranks a younger generation of active scholars, writers, public intellectuals, and advocates.

**The binary "law" and "literature" disappears, as law is seen as a system of narratives to be judged for the merits and honesty of authoritative speech, and literature is seen as the imaginative pathway to a better social system. Neither "law" nor "literature" is deemed superior or more powerful. In fact, stories have affected people's behavior over the centuries much more directly than even the most important legal judgments.