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58 U. Cin. L. Rev. 989 (1989-1990)
Book Review

handle is hein.journals/ucinlr58 and id is 999 raw text is: BOOK REVIEW JUDGING LAW AND LITERATURE LAW AND LITERATURE: A MISUNDERSTOOD RELATION. By Richard A. Posner. Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1988. Pp. xi, 371. $25.00. Reviewed by Michael Hancher * Yet is not a critic (KpL'1K6q) a judge, who does not explore his own consciousness, but determines the author's meaning or intention, as if the poem were a will, a contract, or the consti- tution? The poem is not the critic's own. Elmer Edgar Stoll (1932)' Nay, whoever hath an absolute Authority to interpret any written, or spoken Laws; it is He, who is truly the Law-giver, to all In- tents and Purposes, and not the Person who first wrote, or spoke them. Benjamin Hoadly (1717)2 Richard A. Posner, since 1981 ajudge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, undertakes in this book to settle claims made on behalf of the law and literature movement- claims that he finds extravagant though not entirely without merit. The movement defines itself only implicitly in the recent work of various scholars, both in and out of the legal academy, though it arguably began with the eclectic textbook by James Boyd White, The Legal Imagination: Studies in the Nature of Legal Thought and Expression * Professor of English, University of Minnesota. A.B. 1963, Harvard College; M.A. 1964, Ph.D. 1967, Yale University. I want to thank Ellen Messer-Davidow, Paul Murphy and Joel Weinsheimer for their advice. 1. Stoll, The Tempest, ' 47 PMLA 703 (1932). Quoted and criticized by W. K. Wimsatt and M. Beardsley, The Intentional Fallacy, in W.K. WIMSATr, THE VERBAL ICON: STUDIES IN THE MEANING OF POETRY 3, 5 (1954). 2. BENJAMIN HOADLY (Bishop of Bangor), A SERMON PREACH'D BEFORE THE KING, AT THE ROYAL CHAPEL AT ST. JAMES'S, ON SUNDAY MARCH 31, 1717 at 12 (5th ed. 1717), quoted in J.C. GRAY, THE NATURE AND SOURCES OF THE LAW 102, 125, 172 (2nd ed. 1921). For Gray, who quotes this passage three times, it epitomizes judicial freedom. [A]ll the Law is judge-made law, Gray comments (125); TheJudge has the last word (171, marginal gloss). Gray ignores the immediate point of Hoadly's remark, which was to emphasize the danger inherent in Roman Catholic institutional claims to special authority for Biblical interpretation. 989

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