Mending the Wall as a Bridge between Law and Literature: Developments, Paradigms, and Prospects
The study of "law and literature" as a literary, cultural, and ideological movement has undergone fruitful development in the past fifty years since the publication of James Boyd White's The Legal Imagination in 1973. This paper traces the prehistory of law and literature long before it crystallized into a self-conscious movement in the 1970s and maps its evolution across three periods: the traditional study of law in literature prior to the 1970s; the new wave of the law and literature movement from the 1970s through the 1990s; and the intersectional, methodologically pluralized development of the field in the new century. Meanwhile, the localized development of law and literature in China, originally emerging as academic romanticism in the context of China's ruleof-law construction, designed to supplement sociological jurisprudence with empirical materials rather than challenge legal orthodoxy, has diverged into two trajectories, namely, the long-dominant empirical approach drawing on traditional literature and film, and the emerging "future jurisprudence" that uses science fiction as legal thought experiments. The paper also reviews the four paradigms of law and literature research: law in literature, law as literature, law of literature, and law through literature. It then outlines six potential trajectories for the field: the critique of textual positivism; the methodological promises of empirical and digital approaches; the speculative turn driven by artificial intelligence and Chinese science fiction scholarship; the global
expansion beyond Anglo-American frameworks; and the reconciliation with law and economics and other interdisciplinary fields, alongside the renewal of pedagogical practice. Moreover, it points out the most promising prospect for law and literature lies not in retreating into textualism but in mending the wall as a bridge toward a more comprehensive understanding of law, literature, and the human future.
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