Cardozo School of Law

Applied Law and Literature in Two TraditionsAuthor(s): Leslie NewmanSource: Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, Vol. 10, No. 2, Tenth Anniversary Volume(Winter, 1998), pp. 125-127Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of Cardozo School of LawStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/743416 .

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Applied Law and Literature in Two Traditions

Leslie Newman

My office, windowless and filled with paintings, is across from Richard

Weisberg's and right around the corner from the busy den of Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature. But my relationship to the journal and the Law and Literature Movement is far more than geographical. As the Director of the Legal Writing Program at Cardozo, I have to render the

journal's mission of critical thinking about the role of text operational. This fall, I have taken on a related responsibility, teaching writing skills to a select group of Yeshiva University rabbinic students as part of the Bella and Harry Wexner Kollel Elyon and Smikha Honors Program at the Rabbi Isaac Elchanan Theological Seminary. My way of celebrating the tenth

anniversary of Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature, therefore, is to reflect on the connections between teaching law students and teaching rabbinic students, and their connections, as well, with law and literature.

What the Law and Literature Movement preaches is the allure of the

mingling of mediums, the notion that a discipline is not just indepen- dently rooted but can withstand, even welcome, its confluence with another. That openness, to technique, to words, to means of expression, becomes part of the applied science of the teaching of writing. Creativity burgeons theory at the intersections of the academic pursuits and the

development of practical skills.

My students, in the law school and in the rabbinic academy alike, are

taught to value both analytical reading and the written word. But they have much more in common. For both, cultural memory is the founda- tion of each of their discipline's appeal and endurance, though law has a different, perhaps more utilitarian relationship to authority. For both, there is sometimes a resistance, born of the desirable impetus to preserve knowledge, interpretation and history, to withstand the influence of other

disciplines. Both thirst for ways to express the beauty of their discoveries and beliefs especially to a public that may not exactly share them. Both

may fall in the trap of using what can be a derivative and spent rhetoric,

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a language of repetition, rather than reflecting their own insights and pas- sions. Both have to learn the thrill of new expression to reflect ideas that need desperately to be communicated.

Here, the gifts of Cardozo Studies in Law and Literature are relevant: its emphasis on the interdisciplinary, its reminder that we can learn from literature, theater, and poetry, something that illuminates law. Its lessons are important, particularly now when it is generally the case that - across fields - students, or citizens for that matter, do not have a common core of knowledge (an essential attribute for effective communication), and when an appreciation of broad sets of sources cannot be taken for grant- ed. My rabbinic students enjoy a powerful shared knowledge of authori-

ty just as my law students are seeking a firm and shared understanding of

legal precedent and doctrine. Both struggle with the problem of deepen- ing their specialized understanding or using the language and references of other fields. And both Law and Literature and Torah Umadda (the interaction of Torah with general knowledge and culture) teach that an enriched vocabulary of references is key to an enriched vocabulary of per- suasion and expression.

Legal studies and rabbinic studies may sometimes appear, both to its students and to outsiders, as insular cultures. But I have observed that the students themselves are always, almost by necessity, restating and uphold- ing the precedential value of enduring texts and sources to create new

genres of interpretation and expression that reach out to many audiences.

Precisely because of these similarities, there is a common theme to the

way I teach writing to the two groups of students. Although teaching writing is necessarily an exercise in nurturing practical skills that further substantive aims, it is not predicated on the separation of theory and prac- tice. Rather, the effort is to enable students to read critically, to concep- tualize both concretely and abstractly, to use sources in some form of reflective analysis and then to synthesize them all in the enterprise of articulation. Whether one writes on behalf of scholarship or profession- al goals, the values of clear and direct language usage, usage that eschews

jargon, and the use of stories and disciplinary cross references, are vital to a literate and effective linguistic written product.

In this regard, the lessons learned teaching law students to communi- cate with clients, judges, and each other, become perfectly applicable in the rabbinic setting. There too study exists within a matrix of glorious cross

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references. The mission of my rabbinic writing course is to help Yeshiva

University's modern Orthodox rabbis hone the verbal tools of leadership, both within their congregational communities and in the world beyond. I have learned from my students there that, with a similar reverence for lan-

guage, the study of Torah is also filtered and expressed through cultural and literary voices. Learning and writing employ text to organize ideas, cultures, inspirations. There is sensitivity to language and form, a tradi- tion that is narratively bound, and a keen recognition of the constraints and possibilities of language. I have come to appreciate the beauty, depth, and wealth of knowledge, thought, and feeling within this tradition and

enjoy a role in helping it find written expression in the present. And, there is a complementary benefit. Just as my background in

teaching writing to law students has aided my work in the Seminary, my rabbinic students have enriched my understanding of legal writing. Few law students bring to textual analysis the discipline of their rabbinic coun-

terparts. Nor are law students required, so basically, to deal with the rela-

tionship between text and authority, though nurturing and enhancing this skill is an elemental goal of legal study and of writing as its most pri- mary lawyering skill.

So, as I shuttle between the law, its writing and its method of study, and writing in the rabbinic context, between the law school downtown and its uptown university campus, I see that it is not a journey between two wholly different worlds. In fact, I feel that it has been an odyssey that reflects the scholarly and practical expedition engaged in with my stu- dents in both venues. I feel this spirit of possibility as I drive downtown

early Friday afternoon, and summer turns into fall and now winter. I revel in the majestic expanse of the Harlem River Drive. Trees partially hide the tower in Highbridge Park, and then, Yankee Stadium emerges, itself a metaphor, where a pastoral game is tucked into the most urban of

settings. And I feel that in this glorious convergence, in this matrix of

openness, everything is possible. Law can become literature, and the lion can lie down with the lamb.

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